Griefers
by gwynora
Summary: As a member an infamous guild of trolls and griefers, Sybiler always delighted in shooting down other YGGDRASIL players to blow off steam. When she logs in on the final day and then finds herself in the New World, she learns some hard lessons about actions and consequences.
1. Chapter 1: In With a Bang

Upon a mountain overlooking a dense forest in the far reaches of Vanaheimr sat a quaint, lonely cottage. On the front stoop of that cottage sat a lonely girl.

Sybiler slouched in her rocking chair with the posture of an old woman and the stern expression of a disappointed boss. She looked out over the landscape with a critical eye. Just five years ago she would have considered this a beautiful vista; now, all she saw was the way the tree branches clipped into each other as they swayed robotically in nonexistent wind. She glanced down at the hands of her own avatar and scoffed. She could practically see the polygons.

Well, that was to be expected from a twelve year old game. It had been forever since Sybiler had logged in to this account. Her entire guild, Ars Solanum, had ditched YGGDRASIL three years ago in favor of a shiny new sci-fi DMMORPG called Furthest Reach. Now that she was back here, the difference in graphics quality between the two games shocked and amused her. Well, she wouldn't have to deal with the shoddy graphics for long. Thirty more minutes and the servers would be shutting down for good.

There were some things about YGGDRASIL she had missed, however. She stood, walked off the porch and a little ways down the mountain slope, and looked back at the cottage in admiration. No DMMORPG allowed as much customization as YGGDRASIL, especially not of guild bases. In Furthest Reach, the most her guild could do with their mothership was change some colors or buy cosmetic upgrades designed by the official devs. Here, her guild had been able to upload their own art assets to remodel this place however they wanted.

When Ars Solanum first found this dungeon, the entrance was a thick stone slab enchanted with sealing magic, which only a one-of-a-kind item or Super-Tier magic could open. After they captured it, they decided to do away with the boring old seal and put a happy little cottage over the entrance instead. They'd modeled the cottage after the kind often found closer to the center of Vanaheimr's map. Usually theses cabins were home to kindly old herbalist NPCs would would sell potions and give free healing to players. Over the years many clueless players had fallen for the guild's little trick, wandering into the cottage in hopes of restocking their potion supply, only to be swiftly killed and looted by the very old herbalist they came to see.

Chuckling to herself at the fond memories, Sybiler wandered back into the cottage. Inside was a warm, cozy space, packed with rustic wooden furniture and baskets of herbs and spices she couldn't smell. In one corner next to a looping animated fireplace sat Nana, a custom NPC made to pose as a harmless herbalist. A kind, gentle smile graced her lips as her default expression, and she sat with her wrinkled hands folded in her lap as she awaited orders. Sybiler paid her no mind.

Three simple shelves were affixed to the far wall, and on them sat a series of picture frames, each holding a painting of a young, bright-eyed adventurer. Nana always told curious visitors that these were her grandkids, but in reality, each picture was one of the core guild members back when they were level 1. She picked them up and admired them one by one, going on a trip down memory lane.

Vulevina, who had already found a way to make the elf starting gear look slutty. Pertooee, showing off an oversized magic sword he had scammed off some sucker on day one. Eight=Dee, making a bizarre hand gesture in reference to what was by now a long dead meme. Sybiler cringed and chuckled at the last one, and decided to take a screenshot of it to send to Eight=Dee later that evening. That was some good blackmail material.

As fun as reminiscing was, it didn't feel like a proper goodbye to YGGDRASIL. She yearned to grab her bow, snipe some unsuspecting chump of a player with a one-shot arrow, and teabag them while spamming eggplant emojis until their avatar faded into nothing. Unfortunately, doing that today wasn't practical. YGGDRASIL's player base had dropped off severely in the last few months, so even if she spent all of her remaining time hunting, she probably wouldn't find a single player to attack.

Besides, anyone who was still online in these final minutes was likely here for the same reason she was—saying goodbye. Sybiler was a troll, sure, but she was no monster. Messing with people on DMMORPGs was just a way to harmlessly let off steam; she liked to think that the real her was a compassionate, considerate person. Rudely interrupting someone's farewell to twelve years of fun and hard work would be taking things too far.

Sybiler glanced at the clock on her console. 20 minutes left. The last thing to say goodbye to was the NPCs the guild had lovingly crafted. Or, at least, the versions of them left in YGGDRASIL. The guild had recreated all of their favorite NPCs as crew members in Furthest Reach already. Sybiler turned her attention towards Nana. "Tell everyone to gather in the main hall," she said.

Nana didn't respond.

Sybiler grimaced. She forgot how primitive the command system in YGGDRASIL was compared to the AI crew members in Furthest Reach. It took her a moment to remember how she was supposed to do this. She opened her console and scrolled through her substantial list of spells until she found Command Troops. She fumbled with the complex options menu until she figured out how to tell all guild hall NPCs to congregate in the main hall. Casting Gate to get down to the hall herself was not nearly as tricky.

A swirling purple portal appeared in front of her. She stepped through it and found herself in a massive circular room made of marble from floor to high ceiling. The walls were lined with nine banners, and in front of each one was a grand throne. Each throne had a unique aesthetic design as distinct as the guild leader who once owned it. Between the banners rose thick, grand pillars carved of purple crystal; they looked refined at first glance, but upon closer inspection they were clearly designed to look as phallic as possible without breaking content guidelines.

Over the grand double-doors of the hall hung a tenth banner: a field of gold, with a large, juicy eggplant emblazoned in the center. Delicate white linework swirled around the central symbol, which both added a level of refinement and created the illusion of liquid spurting out of the tip of the eggplant. Technically the symbol met YGGDRASIL's content guidelines, but anyone with half a dirty mind could tell what it was supposed to be.

The eggplant was the guild's sigil, it's calling card, the perfect encapsulation of everything that Ars Solanum stands for—fucking over newbs and dicking around. Truly a banner befitting the most infamous guild of griefers in all of Vanaheimr.

Sybiler walked over to her own throne. When she first designed it, she had made it an unadorned wooden chair, only throne-like in its size. Now it was decorated with a colorful collection of magic items she had snatched off of her fallen victims. She sat down on the cushion, made from a half dozen magic cloaks bundled together, and laid her forearms on the sheathed legendary swords that covered the armrests.

As she settled in, an army of NPCs began to flood into the room through the double doors. They marched in orderly lines, their faces blank and lifeless. NPCs personally created by any of the nine guild leaders split from the group and fell in line besides their original creator's throne. Sybiler preferred quality over quantity when it came to NPC creation, so she only had one entirely to her name. He was a young man who appeared about twenty years old, with wild, bushy brown hair and plain peasant's clothing. A small, sharp snagletooth hanging over his lip was the only visible sign of his werewolf race.

"Beta," Sybiler called. The werewolf approached her and stood before her throne. Although his eyes were on her, his attention was not; being a primitive bot with minimal AI, he had no real attention to give.

She opened her console and scrolled through Beta's NPC data. She'd forgotten many of the decisions she'd made when putting together his stats and abilities, but smiled at her own genius as she read through his file and reminded herself. Beta was intended to be the ultimate ambush boss in the Verdant Underbelly dungeon. Using advanced player-tracking behavior algorithms swiped from the internet, Beta was trained to silently stalk any intruders in the dungeon, analyze their abilities, and attack them at the exact moment when they were least prepared to deal with his offensive skillset. Back when there were guilds around who bothered to raid them, he had wiped out many parties singlehandedly after they wore themselves down on the rest of the dungeon.

She scrolled until she reached Beta's biographical information, and suddenly her self-satisfaction was replaced with a sad lump in her throat. She'd recognize those wall-like paragraphs of choppy prose anywhere. Like many in the guild, Sybiler never had the patience herself to write proper backstories for NPCs, so she handed that responsibility off to SevenLink. That girl always put so much care into the life stories of every NPC, from the strongest floor guardian to the humblest maid. Sybiler only made it through a few sentences of Beta's biography before she had to close her console.

Her gaze drifted over toward's SevenLink's throne—well, her raised platform. That girl never sat down if she could help it. SevenLink was the best of the guild, a shining star of kindness floating above a sea of soulless morons. Usually being a troll was a requirement for joining Ars Solanum, but she was so pure and precious that the guild had to make an exception. Originally she was one of Sybiler's own assassination victims, but when she discovered that SevenLink was a shy, lonely paraplegic who played YGGDRASIL to feel like she could walk again, Sybiler felt so bad about robbing her that she offered her membership as an apology. As far as Sybiler was concerned, it was the best decisions she had ever made.

No one had heard from SevenLink in four years. The guild knew she wasn't mad at anyone; one day she was as happy and enthusiastic as ever, and the next she was gone for good. She never logged on, she didn't join Furthest Reach, she never responded to a single message. The whole guild feared the worst but never got an answer about where she went.

Sybiler wished she could go around to every NPC and save all of their biographies somehow, but she knew there wasn't time. She at least had Beta's saved somewhere. Maybe if she contacted the developers later they could extract the data for the rest of them.

Now that she was on this depressing train of thought, every NPC was another grim reminder of SevenLink's uncomfortable absence. This grand hall was starting to feel stuffy and small. She glanced at the clock. Ten minutes left. She had an idea for how to fill the time.

"Everyone!" she called out to the NPCs. Dozens of them looked at her simultaneously, like creepy animated dolls in a horror film. She took a moment to shake off the uncanny valley discomfort, cleared her throat, and shouted another order. "Follow me!"

She strolled out of the guild hall, the guild's entire army of NPCs in tow. It would have been easy to teleport outside with magic, but she felt like taking the scenic route. Together, she and the NPCs marched through all nine levels of the Verdant Underbelly dungeon. They passed through thick jungles, open fields, forests of mushrooms and swamps teeming with carnivorous plants.

Finally, they reached the end of the first level, and Sybiler climbed the stairs that lead into the cabin. There wasn't enough room for all of the NPCs to fit in the cabin or on the porch, so she told everyone to stay back except for the floor guardians and Beta. She stepped out onto the porch and looked over the vast, poorly rendered wilderness once again. It wasn't Furthest Reach, but this place sure held a lot of memories.

Three minutes remained.

This seemed like a nice note to end on. She considered logging out, but she was too curious about what cheesy goodbye graphic might display when the servers finally shut off. Well, she could stand here and stare at the horizon for a little while longer, she supposed.

Two more minutes.

God, she was bored. A passing thought hit her; her inventory was bloated with items she had looted off of other players but never used. Before she had always been scared to spend them in case she needed them someday, but the chance of her needing any of them in the next few minutes was next to none.

Now that she thought about it, staring off into space like some edgelord was a whimpering end. She wanted to go out with a bang.

Sybiler opened her inventory and looked for the most powerful items in her possession. Most of them had ridiculously long activation times, but one of them looked reasonable—the Ancient Wand of Armageddon Firestorm, a single use divine item that blasted off a Super-Tier fire attack with an area of effect a mile wide. That sounded fun.

One more minute.

She summoned the wand to her hand with a flourish. It had a thirty second casting time, so if she waited a short while, she could make a raging firestorm her final sight in YGGDRASIL. She waited until the countdown clock hit 0:00:45, then activated the wand.

"Look out there!" she said to the NPCs, pointing into the distance with her wand. All of her followers dutifully obeyed.

She grinned, despite the sad tightness in her chest. Goodbyes always sucked, but maybe an explosion would make it better. "It's been a pleasure," she said to them, as if they could comprehend her words. "You've all served Ars Solanum well. You even defended this place after we all ditched you, which is more than we expected. I say we celebrate a job well done and all the fun we've had over the years."

The tip of the wand burned with white-hot fire as the casting time ran close to its end.

"And every celebration needs some fireworks."

Sybiler pointed the wand forward and up, and a small marble of magic blasted into the sky like a shooting star. She cackled like a maniac and awaited Armageddon.

Nothing.

She could still see the little dot of fire magic arcing through the sky, but none of the hellfire she was promised rained from above. Only then did she remember an important property of the wand—the firestorm wouldn't activate until that little marker that the wand shot out hit a solid target. There was no way it would hit the ground in time.

Her arms dropped to her sides in disappointment. "Fucking blueballs," she hissed to herself. She tossed the wand onto the ground with a satisfying clatter. Five seconds.

She supposed this was what she deserved. After nearly a decade of trolling, it seemed appropriate for the game to troll her back. She laughed at the irony, smiled, and held out two middle fingers for this whole damned world to see. "Love you too, YGGRASIL!" she shouted at the top of her lungs. She sounded sarcastic, but deep down, she meant it.

The clock hit zero. Sybiler blinked.

Faster than her synapses could fire, the scene before her changed. One moment it was a wild, untamed forest without a sign of civilization, and the very next it was idyllic countryside with a healthy mixture of forest and farmland. From her vantage point on the mountain she could see a sizable village a few miles away, which was styled more like a Midgard settlement than anything from Vanaheimr. Even the sky was different; the sparse stars had been replaced by a vibrant, glimmering slice of the Milky Way. The only things that stayed the same were the porch beneath her feet and the spark from her wand, which continued to fly on the same trajectory.

She blinked a few more times, baffled. "What the fuck?" she muttered to herself. Her first instinct was that someone had teleported her as a prank, but even if that were the case, the server should be shut off by now.

After a few stupefied seconds of thought, the best explanation she could think of was that this was some preview for a YGGDRASIL sequel—one with much, much better graphics. God damn, the resolution on this put Furthest Reach to shame. She leaned against the railing with an excited grin, eyes on the sky looking for a logo reveal, ears tuned for an announcement echoing across the world.

After a tense few seconds, Sybiler noticed that her little Armageddon spark had finally fallen and vanished somewhere around the village. She paid it no mind. Since this was some preview or tech demo for whatever the YGGDRASIL developers had in store next, she assumed the magic would fizzle out. If they dumped so much money into making a forest and village look this unbelievably cutting-edge, there was no way they had already figured out explosions.

The twinkling stars began to dim, and her chest tightened with excitement. This was it. She wondered if they were going to stick with the Norse mythology theme in the next game, or go in a totally new direction. Black clouds began to swirl, blotting out the night sky entirely. Deep red lightning rolled within the clouds, like lava under a cracked shell of freshly dried volcanic stone.

As wonderful a spectacle as it was, Sybiler was less concerned with the visuals and more focused on the atmosphere around her. The magical storm whipped up gusts of wind that blew in a vortex around the area. The trees bent and shook with far more realism than before, on par with reality. But by far the strangest part was that she could feel the air pushing against her cheek. Did she leave the fan next to her bed on? No, if she did, she wouldn't just be noticing now.

Gripping the railing tighter, she realized that she could feel every bump and groove of the wood, as if she were touching a real wooden pole. This haptic feedback was incredible, but wouldn't that require new Dive hardware? There is no way they could get this level of detail with just a software update.

Before she could finish pondering this, the sky opened, and fire poured down from the clouds with the force of a geyser. A pillar of flame a mile wide engulfed the landscape, its bright light so overpowering that no color existed except for burning red. The very ground beneath her feet shook violently, make the cottage creak, but she could barely hear that over the low, deafening rumble that swallowed everything around her.

That was an Armageddon Firestorm if she had ever seen one.

The pillar of flame convulsed, causing a visible shockwave to explode out of the firestorm. Tongues of flame were knocked loose by the force and scattered about in all directions, setting even more of the forest ablaze. Trees bent and snapped as the shockwave flew towards the porch. It hit, sending the cottage shaking and shuddering, threatening to collapse it into a pile of sticks. Sybiler stumbled back as the force hit her, barely keeping her footing. She became overwhelmed by the explosive pressure, the acrid stench of smoke, the wave of smoldering heat that she feared would light her on fire with the rest of the forest. It hurt. It actually hurt.

A Dive game couldn't make her feel this way. Not just technologically, but legally. Sensations of this intensity, especially painful ones, were explicitly banned in consumer-grade simulations. This couldn't be a game.

And then, a suddenly as it began, the firestorm faded. The clouds dissipated and the stars crept out of their hiding spaces. The distant village was gone, now replaced by a mile-wide circle of scorched earth, bordered by still-burning trees.

Sybiler gawked at the destruction. That felt real; that was all so unbelievably real. She couldn't even convince herself that she was dreaming. In a normal dream, a climactic, painful moment like that would have woken her with a start. This was something else entirely.

The adrenaline rushing through her veins forced her to take the scene before her seriously. If this was real life, then that was a real village. With real people. People who were, in all likelihood, now dead, because of the wand she activated.

She had killed them.

**A/N: Hello! I'm just some nerd trying to rediscover my love of writing, and this is very fun to write. I know everyone is tired of OC stories, but I'm just here to have a good time. For those hoping to see some Nazarick action, Ainz and friends will be showing up later, but probably not for a number of chapters. **

**EDIT: Thank you PatProtecc for alerting me about the formatting problem. Hopefully this fixes it. **


	2. Chapter 2: Armageddon

This wasn't real. This couldn't be real.

Sybiler was either too stupid to know how the devs pulled off this level of detail, or she was too oblivious to figure out that she was in a dream. Or maybe there was a third, perfectly reasonable option that she was too panicked to see. All she knew was that if this were real life, then she just murdered an entire village of people, and that couldn't be true. It just… couldn't.

She rubbed her eyes, her hyper-realistic hands pressing against the accurate curves of her face. No, she couldn't let herself be tricked. She stared at her hands with an intensity she never had before, searching for any visible polygon, any rendering glitch, even the slightest clipping issue. Nothing. She prodded the ball of her thumb and watched her avatar's skin squish and fold like real flesh should.

For the first time, she noticed how eerily silent it was. Before, there was always some faint background music track playing in the back of her mind; now, all she heard was the distant crackling of the forest fire, and her own fast, labored breathing. She hated it. She tried to conjure the familiar Vanaheimr wilderness theme song in her mind, practically hummed it to herself, but it felt so much faker than everything that surrounded her.

Then, another sound reached her ears. Shaky breathing that wasn't hers. A sob from behind her.

Sybiler turned back to look at the NPCs. Like everything else, they had taken on a whole new level of detail. Their faces were no longer confined to a default expression; even the ones with faces that were supposed to be stiff or concealed had subtle changes to their movement and posture that revealed emotion.

All of them looked out at the horizon, and then at Sybiler. They looked… sad. Heartbroken. Some of them concealed it better than others, but none of them wore their despair as plainly as Beta. The werewolf's face was contorted in grief. His yellow eyes watered as he barely held back a river of tears.

My heart dropped into my stomach. Were they mourning the loss of that village? She almost felt like crying herself, so it seemed like the most likely reason. In that case, did they blame her for it? How long before their sadness turned to rage? With how much of a nightmare this was shaping up to be, her own NPCs turning against her would fit the script.

She looked the guardians over again. Juggernaut the minotaur was so huge he nearly took up half the porch, and could snap her in half like a twig. Kyaan the Naga had venom potent enough to paralyze an elder dragon in a single bite. Caramel the Seraph-Centaur may not have looked like much, but Sybiler knew the girl had 10th tier magic and could fire it off at any moment. Every one of the nine floor guardians was a force to be reckoned with, especially if the game truly had become reality.

Sybiler was confident that she could fight off any individual NPC, assuming that she had all the same powers as before, but she could be facing all of them. Her build was made for one-on-one PvP, not fighting mobs of high level enemies. She wondered how painful dying would be here.

Beta took a step towards her, tentatively, almost timidly. Kyaan grabbed him by the shoulder and hissed in his ear. He took a step back, but then something snapped within him, and he lunged at Sybiler with terrifying speed and power.

She screamed and stumbled back, but the railing of the porch blocked her escape. She closed her eyes, bracing herself, but Beta's body didn't slam into her. Instead, he landed at her feet and clamped his hands around her ankles with the strength of a tourniquet, pinning her in place.

"Please don't go!" Beta wailed in a strained, shaky voice. "You can't leave us alone again!"

Even if he weren't holding her down, Sybiler would have been frozen to the spot in shock. The NPCs could speak?

Beta repositioned his splayed body into a deep bow, his face pressed against the floor at her feet. "My life belongs to you, Lady Sybiler, serving you is my only purpose, without you I—"

He was cut off when a thick, serpentine tail slammed against his side like a whip. Kyaan loomed over him, her slitted eyes wide with rage. "How dare you question Lady Sybiler! The will of the Supreme Ones is absolute!"

She pounded him with her tail three more times, each hit charged with more anger and passion than the last. "Ungrateful worms like you are the reason she's leaving us!" There was an edge of pain to her words.

Beta rolled over, his cheeks ruddy and soaked with tears. His face was contorted not in pain, but in shame, as if her accusations hurt far more than any blow could. He bowed his head. "M-my deepest apologies for my unacceptable outburst, Supreme One," he muttered, voice still thick with tears. "I will accept any punishment you deem fit."

Sybiler stared at the two with her mouth agape. The NPCs being transformed into living, thinking people she could accept, it was in line with everything other bizarre thing happening around her, but why were they treating her like this? What the hell was a Supreme One?

Overwhelmed and with no other way to deal with the chaos around her, her mind began to detach from the present. She felt like she was floating in an invisible space inside her mind, watching events unfold through the window of her eyes. It was an odd sensation, but one that helped her focus. Logically she recognized it as dissociation—she'd learned about dissociative disorders in nursing school, but also knew that it could happen to anyone in times of great stress.

She needed to deal with the issues at hand one at a time. Right now, the nearest was the whimpering werewolf groveling on the floor.

Sybiler knelt down next to Beta. He tried to press himself down even tighter to the floor, as if doing his best to appear lower than her.

"It's okay," she said. She noted that her voice sounded different; it was smoother, more graceful, not as nasally as her natural voice. "You didn't do anything wrong."

Beta raised his head and looked up at her, his eyes shining with wonder. He held her gaze for a moment, then bowed his head again. "Thank you for your mercy, my lady."

Sybiler stood, and looked at the rest of them. "I'm not leaving," she announced to the group. "Not for good, anyway." If this was a game, then she'd absolutely be logging in again, because the quality was incredible. If this wasn't a game, well… she didn't have much of a choice about staying, then.

A ripple of relief and joy spread through the crowd of NPCs. Although most of them tried to mask their happiness in the same way they tried to hide their grief before, the change in mood was palpable.

_So, they weren't upset about the village_, she thought, _and they seem to want me around. At least they won't try to kill me._

The word kill reminded her of the situation and sent her heart racing. She clenched her hands into fists, her fingers painfully digging into her palms, in an effort to steady herself. If all of the NPCs—could she even call them that anymore?—were doing their best to remain calm, the same was probably expected of her.

"Um, could any of you remind me what just happened, please?" she asked.

Juggernaut stepped forward, shaking the whole porch a he moved his massive, dark form. "We were celebrating the accomplishments of the great guild Ars Solanum by watching you perform a show of force. We are in awe of your unmatched power, Lady Sybiler."

They were so… formal. Reverent, even. Was it because she was a guild leader? That made her an organizer of mischief at best, not a queen like they were treating her. Whatever the case, she barely stopped herself from squirming in embarrassment. She tried to focus on the fact that they apparently knew about the guild, meaning they somehow had memories from the original YGGDRASIL.

"Okay… did you see me aiming at a village before? When I first fired the wand off?"

Juggernaut shook his heavy bull's head, his gold septum ring clinking as it swayed. "You cast the spell into the forest, and then you teleported the entire mountain somewhere else. I have never heard of such magic. Incredible."

The other floor guardians nodded along with enthusiasm.

"And the destruction!" cheered Skrat, the guardian of the 4th floor. He was a literal troll, suitable for a guild like Ars Solanum, and his long, pink tongue flopped out of the side of his mouth as he spoke. "Oooh, you showed those little weaklings who the real boss is! I bet there isn't anything left to bury, just piles of ash. Wait, there's no one left to do any burying!" He cackled as if he'd heard the best joke of his life. A few of the others laughed lightly along.

The celebration among the floor guardians left Sybiler with an odd, conflicted feeling. On one hand, this kind of hyperbolic shit-talking was common among the guild members after victories against other players. On the other hand, those victories always felt like one-uping someone in a game of chess, not like actual murder.

_Realism is overrated_, she thought. Somehow, believability had sapped all the fun from the game. She didn't want to play this anymore.

"I… I think I'll turn in for the day," Sybiler said. She was already going to be late for work at this rate. "But I won't be gone forever, don't panic." That might have been a lie, but she didn't want to deal with any more crying and groveling. She opened up her console and—

The console didn't appear.

She hesitated. Did they change the gesture? She waved her hand in every way she could think of to conjure a menu, but nothing happened. Maybe it was voice activated now? "Console," she said in a clear voice. Again, nothing. She kept trying. "Console. Connnn-sooole. Menu. Main menu. Access console. Open console." Every attempt became more heated. "Show me the goddamn console!"

"I'm sorry, Lady Sybiler," Beta said. Although he was red around the eyes, he had regained most of his composure and gotten to his feet. "I am not sure what a console is, so I'm afraid I can't show you one."

Sybiler's cheeks burned in embarrassment. "No, I'm sorry. That wasn't directed at you. Give me a moment." She turned away from them all, trying to pretend there weren't 10 sets of eyes watching her.

So, the console was broken. A hopeful part of her thought it could be a bug with the new release. Whatever was causing it, she couldn't access the log out command, or send a message to the GMs. There was one more thing to try—the Dive Gear emergency release command. If she said the right sequence of words, the neural nano-interface would automatically shut off. She knew for a fact that YGGDRASIL was sensitive to it; many times she'd tricked clueless players who never read their Dive gear safety manual into uttering the phrase as a prank. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, focused on the command phrase with every ounce of effort she had, and shouted.

"MASTER COMMAND: EMERGENCY SHUT-DOWN!"

She shouted it three more times to make sure it registered, then opened her eyes, expecting to see the comforting sight of her tiny apartment. All she saw was the smoldering crater far in the distance.

This wasn't a Dive simulation. Either this was the most lengthy, vivid, and persistant dream she'd ever dreamt, or this was all really happening. And if she couldn't wake up, she had to assume the latter.

And if this was real, that meant people were dead.

"My Lady?" Beta said. "Are you okay? You're shaking…"

She blinked and looked down at herself. She was shaking, as he had said. How long had she been standing here? Imagined scenes of buildings burning and innocent people screaming as fire consumed them looped in her mind.

"Scrat?" Sybiler croaked.

The troll stepped forward and bowed. "Yes, Supreme One?"

"Are you sure that everyone died? Could there… could there be any survivors?"

Scrat tilted his head in thought, his floppy tongue lazily sliding from one side of his mouth to the other. "With the power you used, there is no chance anyone in the buildings or outside survived. No way at all!" He scrunched up his face, thinking hard. "I guess if any of the buildings had a stone basement, someone could have hidden in there and made it. Even then, I bet they got crushed by the building over them collapsing!" He grinned. "I say survivors are very unlikely, my lady."

"But not impossible?" Sybiler said.

"Would you like us to search for survivors?" Beta asked. "We can make sure none live to tell the tale—"

"NO!" Sybiler barked. All of the floor guardians tensed and went silent.

"No, you won't do that," she muttered again. If there was even the slightest chance that someone survived, she could never live with herself if she didn't try to rescue them. But how was she supposed to do that? If she couldn't access the console, that meant her skills, spells and inventory were out of reach.

The only tool at her disposal was the NPCs, but that also gave her pause. From this first impression, they seemed sadistic, and she worried their loyalty to her might fade if she didn't act how they expected. In YGGDRASIL, she had killed without remorse, but only because no one was actually getting hurt. What if they demanded the same of her even when real lives were on the line?

As desperation set in, Sybiler's eyes landed on Caramel, and she had a spark of inspiration. Of course. Caramel was the creation of SevenLink, the only consistently kind member of Ars Solanum. If any NPC would have a tolerance for empathy, it would be her. Plus, she had a cleric build, which could be just what the village needed.

"Caramel," Sybiler said, her new hope making her voice stable and strong. "You can cast healing spells, can't you?"

The four-winged centaur trotted forward out of the group of floor guardians, her short, wavy hair bobbing as she moved. Although her human upper half was small, likely belonging to a girl just over five feet tall, the slender legs of her equine lower half were long, giving her a few inches of height over Sybiler. Caramel looked down at Sybiler with sparkling brown eyes filled with excitement. "I can!" she spred the two sets of white wings, the first sprouting from her human shoulder blades and the second attached to her horse midsection, as if to emphasize her angelic nature. "I know all the best healing and resurrection spells!"

_Perfect_. "Caramel, follow me," Sybiler said. "The rest of you, stay here."

Caramel squeaked in happiness and skipped to her side. Sybiler would have found it adorable if she weren't so horrified by everything else happening. She considered using magic to get down there faster, but that wasn't an option. She would have to go by foot.

Without wasting any more time, Sybiler sprinted down the hill, and nearly tripped over her own feet when she blasted off faster than she could have anticipated. This was the same insane speed she had been able to run at in YGGDRASIL—she had maxed out her agility stat, and brought it even higher with her Superior Quickling Boots—but going so fast with realistic sensory input was a whole new experience. Wind buffeted her face, her feet slammed into the ground faster than she could keep track of, and her stomach lurched like she was in free-fall. It took her a moment to adjust, but she managed and pressed onward.

A trek that should have taken an hour at least was over in a matter of minutes. She'd lost Caramel a ways back, but hoped the NPC would know how to find her. She skidded to a stop right in front of the line where the forest fire began. Although she felt the heat wafting off of the fire, it wasn't particularly painful. She inched closer and closer until she practically stood among the flames, and still, she was fine. Maybe she still had her passive resistances along with her stats, which meant a simple forest fire wouldn't do any damage to her. Comforted, she walked right through the fire, and broke into a run again.

Thirty seconds later, she passed out of the fire and into the zone where there was nothing left to burn. She halted. The scene was even more disturbing up close. There were no buildings, tree, grass, or even visible dirt, just a flat expanse of charred debris and black ash. The crumbling remains of a few stone foundations poked out of the soot, but they were barely recognizable as such. If she didn't know better, Sybiler would have guessed that no civilization had stood here in a hundred years.

She walked forward, dazed, drinking in more and more of the same sight. She payed closer attention to the blackened bits of debris scattered across the ground. Bits of wood, still smoldering. Broken pieces of stone. Shards of red-hot metal. Bones.

She spotted a skull, and averted her eyes from the ground from then on.

In the distance, she saw a building that had survived much better than the others, which wasn't saying much. Half of one of its stone walls was miraculously standing, at least. As she got closer, she realized that another wall had collapsed into it, forming a sort of tent. Could someone have survived in there? When she reached it, she began rolling heavy chunks of rubble out of the way. Her high physical attack stat made moving the stone surprisingly easy.

Slowly but surely, she opened a small hole in the wall of rubble. Out wafted a morbid scent similar to cooked meat. She hesitated, queasiness overtaking her. She wanted to turn and run, but… what if that was a person with severe burns? This was the first sign of someone that wasn't a skeleton. She pushed a larger rock out of the way, allowing the light to stream in.

An arm. Severed, sitting in a pool of congealed blood, red and black with burns. The rest of the body was nowhere to be seen.

Sybiler screamed and fell backwards onto the rubble. She flipped over and vomited. She panted and dry-heaved for another minute, as if her body were trying to clear that horrifying image from her mind in the same way it cleared her stomach.

She laid there for a long while, shuddering, trying to ignore the burning smell around her. When she finally got a hold of herself, she rolled the stones back in place, sealing that man's tomb forever.

"LADY SYBILER!" a high pitch voice called from above. Caramel circled above the crater, searching for her guild leader. It was strange, watching a creature as oddly shaped as a seraph-centaur fly about, flapping her four wings in a hypnotic repeating pattern. Caramel spotted Sybiler on the ground and dove for her, landing on the uneven pile of rubble with surprising grace.

"There you are!" Caramel smiled, as if nothing were amiss. Well, until she sniffed the air, then a look of horror replaced her grin. She glanced at the puke on the ground, then back at Sybiler. "Are you okay, Lady Sybiler? Are you sick? I can cure disease if you need it."

Sybiler shook her head weakly. "I'm fine," she lied. She didn't feel like she had it in her to search for survivors after what just happened, but Caramel offered a solution. "Can you cast Detect Life?"

Caramel nodded.

"I need you to search for survivors," Sybiler said. "When… if you find any, pull them out and heal them as best you can."

"Okay!" Caramel ruffled her wings and closed her eyes, a meditative look crossing her face. "Detect Life," she said. A pulse of soft white light expanded from her and grew to cover the entire crater, like a ripple on a quiet lake. She opened her eyes. "Found one! I'll go get her."

Caramel bounded away, and Sybiler, energize with hope, followed close behind. They crossed the scorched field to another half-destroyed building. Caramel lept onto the ruins and tapped her hoof on a pile of bricks. "She's under this," she said. "I think there's a basement. I don't see a way in, though."

"We'll find it," Sybiler declared. She immediately took to clearing more rubble, searching for a stairwell. Caramel helped as best she could, although she wasn't strong enough to move anything larger than medium-sized chunks.

Five minutes passed, and they were no closer to finding stairs.

"We should hurry," Caramel said. "She's fading fast."

Sybiler grunted in frustration and threw a large chunk of wall to the side. If only she could access her console and spells… but maybe that wasn't how things worked here. What if she couldn't access it because she didn't need it?

"Caramel, how do you cast spells?" Sybiler asked.

The centaur didn't miss a beat. "I think about the spell and say the magic words!"

The magic words must be the spell name. It was worth a shot. Sybiler grabbed Caramel by the hand, closed her eyes, and muttered: "Twin Magic: Vertical Passwall."

An odd sensation of lightness filled her body, and her feet began to harmlessly sink into the floor. She glanced at Caramel and saw that the spell had extended to her as well. Both spells and metamagic worked, it seemed.

The centaur did appear a bit shaken, but that quickly turned into a look of glee. Normally Sybiler would have found her positive attitude endearing, but with how dire the circumstances were, she was almost sickened. How could the other take this so lightly?

The two of them phased downwards through the floor and landed in a basement, and Caramel quickly cast a light spell to brighten the room. The first thing Sybiler noticed was the stairs—or, what used to be the stairs. That half of the room was completely caved in and flooded with debris. They would have needed to dig forever to get down here without magic.

The second thing she noticed was the survivor. Although Caramel insisted that she was a girl, you couldn't tell by looking at her in this state. Her body was a red and grey mass of bruises and blistering burns. All of her hair and clothing had been burnt off completely. Her chest occasionally twitched in a pathetic attempt at breathing, the only sign that she was still alive.

Sybiler clutched her mouth as her nausea resurfaced. "Heal her!" she shouted. "Hurry!"

"On it!" Caramel pranced over to the half-dead body, seemingly unperturbed. Luckily, her lack of urgency didn't result in wasted time. She pointed a finger at the survivor. "Heal!"

The survivor's body began to glow, and before their eyes her wounds healed. Her skin faded from a bloody red to a snow-white color. She was so pale that Sybiler feared that they were too late and she'd passed away already, but the girl breathed deeply now, and had a healthy pink flush across her freckled cheeks. Even her auburn hair grew back, growing in waves all the way down to her hips, draping over her thin body. This was a good thing considering her clothes didn't magically regenerate in the same way.

The girl stirred. Sybiler was so relieved that she nearly dropped to her knees and sobbed. She ran over to the girl and held her by the shoulders, hoping to coax her awake. Now that she was closer, she realized that the other had long, pointed ears poking out through her hair. An elf.

The elf's green eyes fluttered open. At first she seemed dazed, drunk on exhaustion, but then she saw the state of the basement and remembered. Her eyes shot open and she screamed, a piercing sound that made Sybiler feel like her eardrums were about to rupture.

Without thinking, Sybiler fell back on an old habit—a spell she always kept handy in case she ran into an obnoxious NPC that she didn't want to deal with. She held two fingers out towards the shrieking elf. "Sleep."

Instantly, the elf's eyes close and she fell fast asleep. Sybiler felt a bit guilty after the spell took hold. The poor thing was probably scared out of her mind, after what she witnessed—after what Sybiler put her through. That tiny bit of guilt expanded into a mountain of it.

She stood, stared at the wall, and sighed. "Let's… get out of here."

—

Sybiler sat on the remains of a stone well, staring into nothingness. The trees burning in a ring around them had filled the sky with a thick haze of smoke and ash.

The elf girl laid on Caramel's back, still out cold. Even if they were to fly her over the forest fire, Sybiler feared the smoke might choke the elf to death. Her head throbbed whenever she tried to think. This was all too much.

Even though she wanted to give up and do nothing, she didn't want to stare at this fire any longer either.

"Message," she muttered. She felt a soft ping in her mind as the spell connected her to Beta. Good to know that worked on NPCs now. "Beta, I need you and the others to find some way to put out this forest fire."

_Consider it done, my lady_, Beta's voice replied in her mind.

"Be careful about it please. We have someone… er, delicate here, in the crater. I don't want her getting hurt."

_Understood. I swear no harm will come to her._

"Thank you, Beta." With that, she broke the connection. She was relieved that he didn't ask a single question about her orders. One less thing to worry about. The small comfort did little to lighten her mood.

Sybiler closed her eyes to try and block out the destruction all around her, but she could still hear the crackling of the fire, smell the smoke in the air. There was no escape from this.

"Lady Sybiler?"

She opened her eyes and saw Caramel standing right in front of her. She dipped down in the centaur equivalent of a curtsey. "Permission to ask a question, please?"

So much for no questions. Sybiler felt like saying no to Caramel would be too mean, even if she wanted to. She'd done enough bad today. "Go ahead."

"Why did you want to save this elf?"

Sybiler flinched. Caramel didn't seem to notice.

"You went to all that trouble to blow up this village, and then you wanted to make sure not everyone died…" She put her hand to her chin, mulling it over. "Is it because you want someone to live to tell the tale, and tell everyone how powerful Ars Solanum is? Do you want to give her scars again so people believe her story?"

"NO!" Sybiler jumped out of her seat. "That's not it at all! Who do you think I am!?"

Caramel shrunk back at the outburst and folded her wings around herself. "You're… you're Lady Sybiler. The last remaining Supreme One of Ars Solanum, the mightiest harbingers of chaos in all the world. Queen of Grief and Mischief, Bringer of Humility." Although her voice wavered, she said the line like she had repeated it a million times.

The length and bizarre formality of the title confused Sybiler, and the only part she could really make sense of was the "Bringer of Humility" bit. Each of the guild leaders had been given a joking job title based on their preferred method of trolling. Sybiler's favorite pastime was to find high-level players who were too full of themselves, kill them from the shadows when they weren't expecting it, track them down after they respawned, and repeat the cycle until her victim's level was reduced to single digits. The others dubbed her the Humility Distribution Manager. "Bringer of Humility" was pretty close to that, just put through a high fantasy filter.

If Caramel knew that title, it meant she, and likely the other floor guardians, remembered all of conversations and antics that went on in Ars Solanum, or at least had a vague understanding of them. They saw the guild gleefully celebrating the assassination of other players and the of chaos and destruction, all in the name of "trolling" and "fun."

The NPCs also had no idea that anything had changed, or that this was ever a game. In their eyes, destroying this village wasn't any different than what Sybiler usually did, because the people the guild killed had always been real.

They thought Sybiler as a monster.

Sybiler's first instinct was to refute all of this. Tell Caramel that she doesn't actually want to hurt anyone, that it was all a game before but now things are different. She'd even be willing to break it to her that all of the floor guardians were just bundles of code and not real people. However, the words caught in her throat before she could say anything.

What if the floor guardians didn't take that news well?

Sybiler hadn't read most of the NPC's backstories, but she knew SevenLink wrote them to be happy and loyal members of Ars Solanum, with all that entails. They liked killing and trolling as much as she had back in YGGDRASIL, only they didn't understand the difference between PKing and murder.

If they knew she didn't share their sadism, would they turn on her? She couldn't risk that, not now.

"Right. Yes." Sybiler sighed heavily. Accepting the title made her cringe, but what else was she supposed to do? She had no choice but to lean into this persona, and hope that she could manipulate the NPCs into reining in their destructive instincts without losing their favor.

"I am the… the Bringer of Humility," she continued, the words weighing on her tongue like a blatant lie. "So, that means any chaos I cause is to bring humility to people, right?"

"Yeah, of course," Caramel said.

"When I made that firestorm, all I meant to do was…" She wasn't used to spinning lies like this, and she had to pause for a moment to think up a decent excuse. "…use a show of power to… to…remind everyone who saw it that there is something more powerful than them out in the world. You know, humbling them, and all that."

Caramel's face lit up, as if Sybiler had just revealed something amazing. "You're so smart, Lady Sybiler! We were all super humbled!"

So far, so good. "The firestorm was only supposed to hit empty forest. The truth is, I wasn't the one who teleported our base," Sybiler admitted. "I don't know who did. But I never intended to burn this village, and the people who lived here… they didn't deserve it." Her throat tied itself in a knot.

For the first time, Caramel looked truly grief-stricken, like she finally understood the seriousness of death. She gaped at Sybiler, then lowered her head, her bangs hiding her eyes. "I'm sorry." Tears began to drip down her cheeks. "I'm so stupid, I should have realized what was happening… I-I thought they were bad… I should have rushed to help them… I failed you!"

She brought her hands to her face and sobbed; it was a pathetic, innocent sound, one that momentarily melted away all of Sybiler's unease around the centaur. Looking at her now, she couldn't believe that she was worried that this girl was a bloodthirsty monster.

"No, no, it's okay." Sybiler put her hands on Caramel's shoulders and hushed her. "You didn't fail me. You had no way of knowing."

"Please let me make it up to you, my lady!" she cried out. "I… I know! I can resurrect everyone! I can't fix the village buildings, but I can bring the people back."

Sybiler's eyes widened. "Wait, how? There are no bodies to resurrect." Besides, 10th tier resurrection magic could raise a handful of people at most, far less than the population of a village. There was no way Caramel had the MP to pull that off.

"The goddess Eir has blessed me with a great gift of resurrection," Caramel explained. "With her might I can call every spirit that lingers in this place back to us. It hasn't even been an hour, so the spirits should still be tethered here!"

At the mention of Eir, Sybiler remembered what Caramel was talking about. SevenLink had been obsessed with equipping Caramel with every healing-related class in the game, but there was one that was always out of reach—Chosen of Eir, the most powerful healing class in the game. It was only available to players who cleared an exceptionally difficult quest, one that was nearly impossible for a mindless NPC to navigate through. For SevenLink's birthday, the guild worked together to carry Caramel through that quest so she could take levels in the class. It took three days and an immeasurable amount of frustration, but SevenLink's excitement when she found out made it worth the effort.

Chosen of Eir was one of those rare classes that came with a free Super-Tier spell at its highest levels, which was the only way for an NPC to get access to one at all. The spell was called Field of Resurrection, and allowed the caster to revive up to 700 levels worth of beings that died within a certain radius, which was luckily wide enough to cover the ruined village. Considering villagers were usually level 1, reviving the whole population of the village was a possibility.

If that spell could reverse this tragedy, the effort to get it would have been doublly worth it.

"Do it," Sybiler said.

Caramel nodded, slid the unconscious elf girl off of her back and onto soft ground, and galloped towards the center of the ruins. Sybiler followed.

When she reached the center, Caramel lept off the ground and spread her four wings, and hovered as if suspended by invisible strings. Streams of magical runes poured out of her and surrounded her in shifting, orbiting rings. She clasped her hands in prayer.

"Oh Eir, divine queen of health and life, all things can be cured by your light. As your chosen I beseech you to help those who have been unjustly robbed of their sacred life. Guide their spirits to new bodies, ones with strong hearts and full lungs and blood filled with vitality."

Caramel's entire body glowed, until she was transformed into a silhouette of white against the ash-grey sky. She raised her arms and bellowed. "Death itself trembles before the might of Ars Solanum! Widen Magic: Field of Resurrection!"

The rings of magic runes exploded outwards, drowning the ruins in blinding light. For a moment, Sybiler could see nothing but white. She wondered what she would see when it faded—the villagers, lying unconscious on the ground like the elf girl? Or maybe they would be awake and fully recovered? Would they be calm and grateful, or would they panic like the elf had? Whatever happened, as long as they were alive, Sybiler couldn't ask for anything more.

The magical light faded, and Sybiler saw nothing.

No villagers, lying or standing. No signs of life. Just rubble and ash, exactly like before.

Caramel laid on the ground, wings drooping. She stared at her own hands with a defeated expression.

"Caramel!" Sybiler ran over to her. "What happened? Why didn't it work?"

"Their souls were too weak." Caramel's voice was laced with grief, but was also quiet, as if she were too tired to cry. "If I tried to pull them back, it would have destroyed them forever. I had to leave them there."

With that, Sybiler's last bit of hope fled. She sat on the ground beside Caramel, feeling as dead and numb inside as everything else in this crater.

Of course it didn't work. Even Super-Tier resurrection spells had a level penalty for the person brought back. If these villagers were the equivalent of Level 1, that meant there were no levels to take away, and the spell would fail. They were doomed from the start.

Caramel seemed to notice Sybiler's mood nosediving. She put a hand on her guild leader's knee. "At least they're together on the other side," Caramel said, straining to sound hopeful. "I heard them. They're confused, but they have each other. And it happened so fast that they barely felt any pain."

That caught Sybiler's attention. "You mean, there's an afterlife? You're sure?"

"Yes." Caramel nodded solemnly, with the wisdom of an old sage. "I'm a cleric, so I see it a lot."

They sat in a long stretch of silence.

"Is the afterlife a good place?" Sybiler asked.

"Sometimes." Caramel shrugged. "If you were bad, it's not. And if you're alone it can be scary even if you were good." She looked up at Sybiler with a shimmer of absolute confidence in her eyes. "But you said they were good, so they'll be happy there!"

Sybiler didn't share the same faith. The confirmation of an afterlife was comforting, but not enough to erase everything that happened. She returned to silence and watched the horizon. She could see distant figures darting about in the air, most likely the other floor guardians, and the fire was receding in some areas. As soon the fires were put out, they'd leave, and she'd figure out what to do next. For now, she didn't want to think about anything.

"Huh." Caramel stood up and shook the soot off of her white wings. She looked around, a quizzical expression on her face.

"What is it?" Sybiler asked, only half paying attention.

"There were so many souls, I lost track of them," Caramel said. "Looks like I brought one back after all!"

That snapped Sybiler back to the present. She followed Caramel's gaze and spotted what she was talking about. A lone figure stood a few dozen yards away, cast in dark shadow by the raging fire in the distance. At their side they held some long, object with a red-hot end, which reminded Sybiler of a Firestone Spear weapon. Even though their eyes were hidden, she could feel the figure staring right back at her.

This couldn't have been some ordinary, 1st level villager. Whoever this was, they were strong enough to make it through a resurrection. They could be a danger.

The figure widened their stance. They brandished their weapon, let out a bellow with ferocity that rivaled the firestorm, and charged.

—

—

—

**A/N: Thanks to everyone who alerted me about the formatting last time! I've figured out the problem, and hopefully it won't happen from here on out. **


	3. Chapter 3: The Monsters Who Did This

"Get behind me!"

Sybiler shot to her feet and put herself between Caramel and their mysterious charging foe. This was bad. The enemy was armed with some kind of magic weapon, while Sybiler didn't even have access to her inventory. Caramel was the most useless NPC in the Verdant Underbelly when it came to combat. To top if off, they were on a flat plane with no where to hide, which was the worst battlefield possible for Sybiler's stealthy assassination playstyle.

Sure, she could have relied on spells, but it had been three years since she played this game, and seeing someone charging at her with murderous intent for real sent her too far into an animalistic fight-or-flight mindset. She couldn't remember a single spell she had.

Her only idea was to distract their foe while Caramel got help from one of the more combat-ready floor guardians. She may not have had a weapon, but she did have her sky-high agility stat, plus a bunch of passive abilities that made dodging a breeze. If she could dodge their attacks for long enough she should be okay, but if this enemy was high enough level, a hard hit or two could make things go south. Her HP left a lot to be desired, relatively speaking.

"Caramel," she said, "I need you to—"

Before Sybiler could give the order, the enemy finally got close enough that she could see them clearly—and the sight left her speechless. It wasn't a bulky warrior weilding a flaming magic spear, or a mage with a prepared fire spell flickering at the end of their magic staff. It with just some elf, skinny and pale, waving around a flaming tree branch like a sword. A butt-naked elf, at that.

Somehow, this sight made her lose her resolve far more than an actual threat could. Sybiler hadn't been too bothered by the elf girl's nudity, probably because she was a fellow woman and the circumstances were far more innocent, but something about seeing this man's full-frontal junk swinging about as he charged screaming towards them made her reel. She covered her eyes and let out an embarrassed shriek.

It occurred to her that this was by far the best evidence she'd seen that this had to be real life. A YGGDRASIL sequel wouldn't show genitals at all, let alone in so much detail; if it had somehow been replaced by a porn game, that elf's equipment would be much larger and more impressive.

"YOU MONSTER!" the elf shouted. "You scripture dog! You'll pay for this! I'll send you to hell, you—"

He suddenly cut off. Sybiler opened her eyes and saw Caramel holding up the kicking, squirming elf by the throat.

"It's not a good idea to talk to a Supreme One like that, you know," Caramel said matter-of-factly. "You don't sound very grateful. I gave you life again, so I could take it away, you know."

"Put him down!" Sybiler ordered. After going to all that trouble revive him, the last thing she wanted was for him to choke to death. Caramel obeyed.

The elf dropped to the ground. Sybiler feared that he would get up and start attacking again, but his expression had gone from furious to awe-struck. "That voice…" He stood. "You're the angel. The one who tried to save all of us."

"That's me!" Caramel beamed and fluffed up her wings in pride.

He threw his stick onto the ground—probably for the best, as it was beginning to burn too close to his hand for comfort—and dropped onto one knee. "I'm so sorry," he said, with reverence so deep one would think he was talking to a god. It was oddly similar to how the floor guardians spoke to Sybiler. She wondered if everyone talked to each other that way here, and she was being ridiculously rude by being so casual.

"I thought you were the ones who caused this calamity," the elf explained. Sybiler could hear a hint of anger in his words, but she sensed that they weren't directed at them anymore. He glanced at Sybiler, still looking a bit wary. "Is this your ally?" he asked Caramel, as if his real first guess was that Sybiler was her prisoner.

"Way more than an ally!" Caramel spread her wings out wide, preparing a grand declaration of her master's title. "This is—"

"A very close friend!" Sybiler said, interrupting her. She shot Caramel an intense, forced smile, daring her to continue. She didn't want any names, including the name of their guild, spreading around until she knew this mess wouldn't get pinned on them. "Yes, we've known each other for years, haven't we, Toffee?" She put heavy emphasis on the fake name, hoping Caramel would get the hint.

Caramel retracted into herself again, half confused, half intimidated. "Right. Best buddies."

The elf didn't seem to notice the subtext, and relaxed at her reassurance. "I am honored to meet you, Lady Toffee. I could never thank you enough for this second chance you have given me, nor could I apologize enough for attacking your dear friend." He bowed deeply, with the grace of a knight. "The least I could do is swear my life to your service. Please, use me as you see fit."

Caramel smiled graciously. Sybiler would have been squirming in her boots at such an overdramatic display, but the centaur handled it with the poise of a seasoned princess who had dozens of men under her fealty. "What is your name?"

"Deshi of Maizen Village." He hesitated after saying that, then breathed heavily. Sybiler assumed that this had been Maizen Village.

"Deshi, I ask only one thing of you." Caramel smiled like an angel. "Swear yourself to my good friend instead. Without her, I never would have resurrected you."

_Without me, you wouldn't have had to_, Sybiler thought bitterly.

"As you wish, Lady Toffee." Still kneeling, Deshi turned himself towards Sybiler. Now that he was facing her, she was struck by the fact that he was still completely nude. At least she couldn't see his private parts from this angle. He looked into her eyes as if he didn't realize how awkward this was. "And what is your name, my lady?"

"I'm… um…" Sybiler flipped through her mental catalog of aliases she'd used over the years, but most of them were intentionally stupid sounding, and would let anyone peg her as a player from a mile away. It might be better if this elf thought she was an NPC instead… assuming he even understood the distinction. If this world was real, there would be no such thing, and her pseudonyms would just sound ridiculous. "You'll learn my name in due time," she said. Lame, but not as lame as introducing herself as 420senpai.

Deshi seemed confused, but he bowed his head instead of questioning it. "Understood, my lady."

She didn't believe he understood for a second, but she wasn't about the push the issue.

"As Lady Toffee has commanded, my life belongs to you," he declared. "What do you wish of me?"

Having the floor guardians follow her orders was one thing—despite them coming to life, a part of her still thought of them as simple AIs designed to obey—but hearing talk like this from a stranger filled her with an unpleasant emotion she couldn't place. Guilt? Disgust? The obvious thing was to tell him to put some clothes on, but even that made her stomach twist up. Besides, there were no spare clothes around for him wear. She could also demand he leave, but what would become of him? She destroyed his hometown, and now he had nowhere to go.

For a guild leader, Sybiler always hated telling people what to do. The world had too many tyrants bossing people around; she knew that firsthand, as well as any corporate cog in the real world. The only reason she accepted a guild leader position in Ars Solanum was because everyone in that guild did whatever they damn well pleased, regardless of what any higher-ups told them. She organized group pranks and mentored anyone who wanted to follow in her griefing footsteps, and got no respect beyond basic friendship in return. That was how she liked it.

In the end, she was a better teacher than master, and she wanted students, not slaves. How could she twist this into that?

"If you are not sure how I could be of use, my lady," Deshi said, "I have a suggestion. May I offer it?"

Thank god, a way out. This way she could let him make his own decision without scaring him off. "Of course."

"If you agree that the destruction of this village is unjust…" He clenched his fists, and his eyes burned with passionate fire. "Let me hunt down the monsters responsible for this!"

It took everything Sybiler had not to visibly react to that. What happened when he figured out that she was responsible? Although she knew he wasn't a physical threat, she'd rather avoid a fight if she could. Plus, what if he called reinforcements? She didn't want to dismiss him outright, that would be too suspicious, so she decided to hold his relative weakness over him. "Is that a good idea? You saw that magic, you'd get killed in an instant!"

"I'd rather die than let my people go unavenged." He turned to Caramel. "Is this not why you gave me another chance? So that I could avenge them?"

"I gave you another chance because my la… my friend asked for it," Caramel said.

He turned back to Sybiler for an answer. She wasn't going to be able to talk him into giving up on his own accord. She hated saying no, but what else could she do?

"Look…" Sybiler rubbed the back of her neck. "I appreciate your enthusiasm, but we have no idea who did it. For all we know, it could have just been a freak accident where you can't really blame anyone. You know, things happen…"

"I know exactly who did this." Deshi glowered, as if staring into empty space at an invisible enemy. "The Slane Theocracy."

She'd never heard of that guild or faction in YGGDRASIL, or in real life for that matter. "The what?"

Deshi's vengeful stewing was interrupted by a bout of confusion. "You… don't know of the Slane Theocracy?"

"We're from very far away." That wasn't a lie.

He seemed to accept that. "The Theocracy is a den of demons," he said, his eyes growing dark again. "Barbarians who dare to call themselves the pinacle of civilization. They believe that anyone who isn't a human belongs in chains or in a shallow grave. They've been trying to invade Elf Country for decades."

"We're in Elf Country now, right?" Sybiler asked.

Deshi nodded.

"And you're sure they would have the resources to do this?"

"I cannot think of anyone else who would, my lady," he said.

She had to admit, this Slane Theocracy made for a very convenient scapegoat. They had both the motive and the means to commit this atrocity, and from what Deshi said, they sounded like a bunch of racist assholes who deserved to get stuck with the blame. However, she hesitated. The way Deshi spoke about them sounded like something about of a propaganda pamphlet. A modest farm boy like Deshi could easily have been trick by his government into thinking the troops on the other side of his country's war were cartoonishly evil monsters.

For all she knew, the Slane Theocracy could be the kind-hearted angels fighting for a righteous cause, while the elves could be villanous puppy-murderers who deserved to die. It was more likely that this situation was way more complicated than that. Whatever the case, Sybiler knew that she didn't want to pick sides in a war she only learned about a minute ago.

Besides, seeing someone else get punished for her mistake would just make her feel even more guilty.

"I'm sorry, but I can't allow you to do that yet," she said to him. "Not until we're more sure. We need solid evidence before taking vengeance on anyone."

She could almost see his heart sinking. His jaw quivered as he held back an argument. "Very well, my lady. But, please let me alert the king about this at once!" His eyes sparkled with new determination. "I'm sure I can get audience with one of his generals, who can tell him. He is very wise, and a powerful caster. I'm sure he could track down whoever did this!"

A memory of the final boss of the Verdant Underbelly dungeon flashed through Sybiler's mind—a fey-elf hybrid sorcerer king with magic so powerful, it took over a hundred high-level guild members swarming him to take him down. She shivered. What were the chances that YGGDRASIL's bosses existed in this new world? Too high for her to want to risk recklessness.

"Deshi," she said in a clear, harsh tone, like a slap across the cheek. "I'm sorry, but no."

He shut up. She could tell by the tension around his mouth that the only thing keeping him quiet was a sense of honor and duty. Still, his green eyes betrayed him, asking a clear question—why not?

She sighed. "I already have something planned for you, but I can't tell you here," she said. Another lie; they were starting to come easier. She hoped that she could throw together a task for him soon that would keep him from contacting any elf kings.

She noticed that the piece of the forest fire between them and the Verdant Underbelly had been extinguished completely. While the floor guardians were still working on the rest of the blaze, it would be safe to pass through now. "Car—um, Toffee, we should head back. Could you fly the girl up to our cabin? I'll walk with Deshi."

Deshi glanced at Caramel when Sybiler mentioned a girl, and his pointed ears twitched, as if he were trying to listen for unspoken details. However, he asked no questions. After Sybiler shot him down so many times, he probably believed that he was on thin ice with his new master. Caramel nodded and galloped off towards where they left the girl before.

Sybiler didn't actually want to walk with Deshi, but she didn't quite trust him yet, and Caramel couldn't carry two people. It occurred to her that she could probably Gate to the cottage, but she also didn't want to show Deshi the extent of her casting. The fewer reasons she gave for him to be suspicious of her, the better.

"Come on, let's go," she said to him. "We have a bit of a hike. I hope you're up for it."

"I am, my lady," he assured her. "Thanks to Lady Toffee's blessing, I've never felt as energized." While there was a drop of excitement somewhere in his tone, it was buried deep under the heavy pile of grief and dread that was crushing him then.

He stood, exposing his whole front again. Sybiler once again realized that he was completely nude. How she forgot, she had no idea. She averted her gaze and bit the inside of her cheek, hoping that her face wouldn't turn red. God, she wished she had some extra clothes to give him.

When she thought about the hypothetical clothes she wanted to put him in, she felt an odd mental sensation, like a deck of cards being shuffled inside her skull. An array of items splayed out before her in her mind's eye, all of them clothing related. Had she just searched her inventory? She found she was able to browse the items as easily as she could on her console—more easily, in fact. Pretty soon she found a set of men's common clothes. They did have a few enchantments on them, but those were all low level, and it seemed like it would be Deshi's size.

Great, but now what?

She focused hard on the item, wondering if she could conjure it like she could a spell. Sure enough, a small purple portal appeared beside her, like a miniature version of the Gate spell. Following instinct, she reached in, and pulled out the very same clothes she'd been thinking about. Good, her inventory worked too. That was a huge weight off of her shoulders.

Deshi gaped in awe as he watched Sybiler conjure a set of clothes from nothing. Once he got over what magnificent magic that was, it seemed to make him realized that he was, in fact, naked, and had been this entire time. His ears drooped in shame, and he lowered his hands to shield his privates from view.

"Here, put these on." Sybiler handed the clothes to him, avoiding eye contact, and turned away.

"Th-thank you, my lady."

After a minute of rustling about, Deshi was fully dressed, and Sybiler could look at him without feeling immediate, overwhelming shame. She couldn't believe she once mistook this elf for a real threat. He looked barely out of his teenage years, although he could be decades old if elves here aged like they did in YGGDRASIL. She'd seen the wiry muscles on him when he was naked, but with fabric swallowing him, he looked almost emaciated. Tired green eyes peered out of deep sockets, and his light brown hair was cropped short, almost shaved off completely.

"Follow me." Sybiler started walking towards the mountain.

For a long while, the two walked in complete silence. As they passed through the charred skeleton of the forest, Sybiler's guilt about what had transpired kept her quiet. After about ten minutes they passed the edge of the burnt area and continued into a lush, temperate jungle. Sunlight shining through the spring-green leaves was a welcome break from firelight, and the earthy scent of the woods purified her lungs of smoke and ash. This place was beautiful; it was almost like she could forget everything that happened here. However, Deshi's constant presence behind her tethered her to reality and kept her away from the bliss of true denial.

After the first half hour, the silence became uncomfortable. She could tell Deshi felt the same way; he squirmed every few yards, as if a million questions were trying to burst out of him at once. That only made her feel more awkward. She knew he wasn't going to be the one to start talking, so she decided to take the initiative. But what to say?

"I didn't know elves had farms," she said, lamely. "Don't you guys live in the woods?"

"Most of us do," Deshi answered immediately. "But we haven't been able to gather enough food the usual way to support an army. The king ordered for some of our tribes to start human style farms to support the troops." He paused for a long while. When he first started talking he had seemed happy for an excuse to, but his mood had gone grim once again. "That must have been why we were targeted. Those Slane bastards want to cut off the army's food supply."

_Shit_, Sybiler thought. She hadn't meant to drag the both back to uncomfortable topics. Maybe silence was better.

For the rest of the trip, neither of them said another word.

—

—

—

**A/N: Sorry about the shorter than average update. I'm going to be at an anime convention all weekend (I hope to get some nice Overlord merch!), which means no time for writing. I wanted to get something out before I leave for that. **


	4. Chapter 4: Icebreakers

**A/N: I recently realized that Deshi is an uncomfortably similar name to Zesshi, so I've decided to change Deshi's name to Deshan. I'll go back and update Chapter 3 with the new name soon. **

—

—

—

"I messed up, Nana."

Nana the dwarf examined Caramel with kind, wrinkle-framed eyes. The poor centaur had galloped in here with a sleeping elf on her back, begged Nana not to hurt the girl, and then collapsed into tears. It had been two minutes since then. Nana had laid the elf down on the prop straw bed, covered her with blanket and made sure she was comfortable, all while Caramel had sobbed her heart out in the corner.

Now, Caramel had collected herself, at least partially. She stood at the bedside and looked down at the elf girl with eyes full of regret.

"Lady Sybiler wanted me to save the people in that village," Caramel continued, "but I could only save two…" She looked up at Nana with watery eyes. "She was so upset. What if she leaves because I was too weak?"

Nana could tell that Caramel was fishing for comfort and reassurance, but she had no intention of giving her any. Upsetting a Supreme Being was one of the worst things a floor guardian could do. As she imagined what must have transpired down in that destroyed village, rage flared in Nana's heart, and Caramel was the target.

Her gaze turned cold. "I hope that our lady is merciful enough to only punish you, and not all of us."

Caramel winced, and looked like she was on the verge of tears again. Nana felt no empathy for her; in fact, the sight was satisfying. That idiot deserved far more than a bit of passive agression.

Some faint footsteps from outside broke the silence. Caramel jolted in panic, and leaned close to Nana. "That's them!" she whispered rapidly. "Don't call Lady Sybiler by her name, and you have to pretend she's your good friend, not your master. Oh, and you need a fake name. Mine is Toffee now, so use that for me. You need to come up with one too, unless Lady Sybiler gives you one first, then use—"

She clamped her mouth shut and stood up straight as the door creaked open. Two figures entered—Lady Sybiler, who stood tall and regal as ever, and an elvish man in traveling clothes, who seemed more confused and overwhelmed than anything else. He eyed the jars and baskets of dried herbs that covered every shelf and surface in the room, as if impressed by their value. He looked like the type of low-level adventurer that Nana was trained to ambush and harvest. However, she stopped herself when she remembered what Caramel had said about two people being saved; if the girl in the bed was the first, this man must have been the second.

For now, she would play kind old grandmother, like she usually did. "Hello, dearies." She stood up with some feigned difficulty and hobbled over to them. She looked up at the elf. "Who is this fine young man?"

"Hello." The young man bowed deeply, with the respect that would be due to an elder. "My name is Deshan. It is a pleasure to meet you."

Although her warm smile didn't change, inside, Nana was deeply relieved to see he had manners. Most young adventurers who came in here would immediately demand free healing like they were kings bossing around a maid-servant. If Deshan had acted like one of those little brats, playing nice would have been much more difficult. No wonder the Supreme One wanted him to be saved from the fire.

"Oh, the pleasure is all mine, deary," she said. "Can I get you anything? Tea? Crackers?"

"You needn't trouble yourself," Deshan said, "I'm fine. But thank you."

It was good that he said no. She asked the question out of habit, but all of the tea she had on hand was poisonous. She would have needed to make a big show of claiming she was all out. This was much simpler.

"Oh good, you're back," Lady Sybiler said, looking right at Caramel. "Is the girl okay?"

"Yes, she's right here!" Although Caramel had been crying just a moment before, her face now looked fresh, without so much as a hint of red around the eyes. She was probably using illusion magic to mask the signs of her disgraceful show of emotion. "She's still asleep."

Deshan noticed the blanket-covered figure in the bed. He inched a bit in the bed's direction and craned his neck, but a table stopped him from getting close enough to really see without drawing attention to himself.

Sybiler tapped him on the shoulder, recapturing his attention. "She's the, um… she's the other person we rescued. Do you know her?"

Now that he was given permission, Deshan shimmied between the tightly packed tables, nearly knocking some baskets over in the process, and went to the side of the bed. He leaned over the sleeping girl's body and brushed her long red hair out of her face with a gentle touch, so that he could see her features.

"Tachel," he said, his eyes wide and his voice barely louder than a breath. "She's the blacksmith's daughter."

Nana was no expert on love, but she knew young infatuation when she saw it. Considering the girl was unconscious and naked under those covers, her first instinct was to pull Deshan away from the bedside, or even kill him before he could try anything. However, she believed that he could be a gentleman and show some restraint. He stood back and didn't lay another hand on her, confirming Nana's hopes.

"Did you know her?" Sybiler asked.

"Not very well, my lady," he said. "She's always been… shy. Rarely ventures outside." A sympathetic look crossed his face. "I don't know if she'll be able to handle this."

Sybiler nodded solemnly. "About that. She should wake up soon, but I have some business to attend to. Do you think you could stay here and, um…" She breathed a heavy sigh. "Fill her in on what happened? She didn't react well to us before, and she might take the news better from someone she knows."

Deshan nodded. "Of course, my lady."

The longer she was around this elf, the more Nana's anxieties diminished. On top of being polite and respectful, he knew his place around Lady Sybiler. He seemed too weak to become a member of Ars Solanum, but if Lady Sybiler asked for him to be initiated on his character alone, Nana wouldn't object.

"Thank you. Toffee and Na—wait, um." Sybiler scrunched her face up, as if kicking herself for some mistake. The expression worried Nana quite a bit. How badly had Caramel blundered, to knock a Supreme Being so far off balance?

"You two," Sybiler finally said, vaguely gesturing to Caramel and Nana. "Can you meet me in the basement? We need to discuss the situation outside."

Both of them nodded. Nana wasn't keen on leaving the cottage unattended, especially with strangers inside, but disobeying Lady Sybiler was an even less attractive prospect.

Sybiler led the way, opening a trap door in the far corner of the room. "We'll try not to be gone too long," she said to Deshan. "Oh, and make sure Tachel doesn't try to leave." With that, she clambered into the trap door and climbed down the ladder, deeper into the dungeon. Caramel followed, but opted to fall down the hole and let her wings catch herself before hitting the ground, since hoofs and ladders didn't mix well.

Nana paused before following them down, and looked back at Deshan. "There's clean water in there," she said, pointing to a barrel along the wall. She gave him a sly smile. "Oh, and don't you try any funny business in Granny Ethel's bed." She tapped on her temple, drawing attention to the knowing glint in her eye. "I see everything, you know."

Deshan's cheeks turned as red as a poppy flower. "I-I wouldn't dream of such a thing!" He put his hands up defensively, as if trying to prove that they weren't being used for anything salacious.

She let out a good-natured cackle, then climbed down the ladder, double locking the trap door from the inside.

—

—

—

Sybiler sat upon her throne, looking down at the kneeling floor guardians before her, at an utter loss for where she was supposed to go from here.

She closed her eyes and tried to sort out what she knew so far. The world of YGGDRASIL had suddenly become real, from what she could tell. The NPCs were real people, but they were all still loyal to her, at least for now. That could easily change if she didn't live up to the expectations they had, which were absurdly high, based on what she'd heard from them so far.

The entire Verdant Underbelly was in tact, but it had been transported to an unknown location somewhere in "Elf Country," whatever that meant. Her Armageddon Firestorm had destroyed a helpless village full of elf farmers, and the incident would likely be pinned on some country called the Slane Theocracy. The two survivors were upstairs at that very moment. The girl was a total wild card who could very well be scared to death of Sybiler and Caramel; Deshan had sworn a life debt, but Sybiler didn't know how seriously he would take that, and it seemed his ultimate loyalties were with some powerful elven wizard-king. A king who probably had both the know-how to figure out that she had destroyed the village and the attack power to get revenge.

Her head throbbed at the thought. She couldn't bear to think about that problem right now; however, the NPCs before her were something she could try to deal with. They were just as powerful as they had been in YGGDRASIL, and they also seemed to have a much better grasp on how to use their power than she did. Keeping them on her side had to be her number 1 priority. She couldn't do that unless she understood them, both in terms of stats and as people.

She thought she remembered them fairly well, considering most of them had analogs in Furthest Reach, but it had also been three years since she'd dealt with these versions of them. She wanted to make absolutely sure she had her facts straight. Perhaps it was best to start with basic, obvious details.

She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. They were all still kneeling, staring up at her expectantly.

"Citizens of the Verdant Underbelly," she said, trying to sound as leader-like as possible. Her new body's graceful voice helped, but the words her stupid Earthling brain had come up with ruined the effect. Citizens, seriously? She sounded more like a hammy superhero than a queen. She cleared her throat and continued. "It's been a long time since I've been here."

"And we are so thankful that you have returned," Beta said, dipping deeper into a bow. He was positioned at the front of the group, as if they'd chosen him to speak for them all. Maybe it was because they knew Sybiler created him personally.

For a second, she wondered if she should have scolded Beta for speaking up without permission, but she didn't want to sound too bossy. Instead, she nodded. "Now that I'm back, I've realized that I don't know as much about all of you as I would like. I mean, I remember you, of course, but after all that you've done for Ars Solanum I feel like I should know you all more personally."

Tension rippled through the floor guardians. At first Sybiler wondered if she did something wrong, but then she saw the barely contained smiles on their faces.

"We are absolutely honored that you would consider rewarding us so generously, my lady," Beta said. "But please, don't feel obligated to do anything for us unless it pleases you. Being able to call ourselves servants of Ars Solanum is more than rewarding enough."

"Well, it pleases me," she said simply. "I can't learn everything about all of you at once, but we need to start somewhere, so…" She thought back to those silly icebreaker tasks that she was forced to do at work or in school. Although she hated them, she was blanking on what else to do. "How about each of you tells me your name, your job here, your creator, and a fun fact about yourself." She pointed at Beta. "You can start."

Maybe it was because she'd been attending too many work seminars recently, but demanding that the floor guardians participate in this ridiculous icebreaker made her feel more powerful than seeing them kneeling before her. She almost laughed at the rush of embarrassment and excitement it gave her.

Beta stood, and put his fist over his heart in a sort of salute. "I am Beta. My job is to coordinate the operations of the floor guardians. My creator…" He paused, his brow furrowed. "I apologize, my lady. I don't understand what you mean by this."

Sybiler blinked in surprise. Did he not remember being created, or at least remember all of the times the guild members had mentioned that she had made him? Maybe they didn't have as good a grasp on what happened in YGGDRASIL as she thought. Instead of handing him the answer, she decided to prod him more. "What I mean is, who brought you into this world?"

Beta nodded. "I understand now, thank you. My mother was Cenedra Pertyr, and my father was either Nikolas Pertyr or Lord Orrian Rathvaldr Ywangar, I am not certain."

Sybiler didn't recognize a single one of those names. They certainly weren't guild members, and she couldn't recall any public YGGDRASIL NPCs with those names. However, the part about not knowing his exact father seemed familiar.

After a moment of scouring her memory, the connection clicked. Sybiler had only read the backstory that SevenLink had written for Beta once, but she remembered there being some drama in it about his mother having a romantic affair with a lord.

Beta had said it without hesitation or uncertainty, as if it were as plain a fact as the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening. If he believed that he had real parents, then it followed that he believed everything else in his backstory, right? Did he remember it as if it actually happened, or did he simply accept it as fact because that's what he'd been told?

Did this apply to every NPC? If so, that put her in an awkward position. Beta's backstory was the only one she ever bothered to read. That made the rest of these floor guardians perfect strangers.

While Sybiler's mind turned, Beta kept talking. "And a fun fact about myself. I am able to—"

"Wait." Sybiler held up a finger to silence him, and he immediately shut up. "I'm sorry, but I've decided I want to do this differently. Is that alright with you all?"

Still unsure whether he was allowed to speak again, Beta nodded. The rest of the floor guardians followed his lead.

"I have new set of questions," I said. "I want each of you to tell me your name, your job here, which guild leader you were closest to, and a quick summary of how you ended up in Ars Solanum." She didn't have the time or patience to listen to nearly a dozen life stories right now, so that seemed like a place to start.

"Very well, my lady," Beta said. "May I start again?"

She nodded. "Go ahead."

"I am Beta. My job is to coordinate the operations of the floor guardians. I would say I was always closest to you, Lady Sybiler, as you are the one who initiated me. I arrived here after I was exiled from my village when I became a lycanthrope. I foolishly came to Nana seeking a cure, but you taught me to embrace my power instead and use it to serve something greater than myself." He bowed deeply. "For that I am forever grateful, and you have my eternal loyalty."

His story confirmed her suspicions. All of that was in line with the story SevenLink had written. "Thank you, Beta. Also, a note on the third question," she said, addressing the crowd. "By who you were closest to, I mean which guild member initiated you." That must have been how the NPCs remembered being created.

Beta stepped back into the crowd, which was quickly organizing itself into a line. Now a nervous human girl was at the front. She looked to be about 16 years old, and completely unremarkable by YGGDRASIL standards in every way. Her face and body were attractive, but in a generic way, as if she were just a few tweaks off one of the avatar presets from YGGDRASIL's character creator. Although her long, braided, bright blue hair would have stood out in real life, it was a popular style available free to new players. She wore basic fighter starting equipment and had an unenchanted sword at her hip. The only piece of true customization she wore was a transluscent blue scarf hung loosely around her neck, but even that was a cosmetic item that could be purchased in any starting town for a handful of gold.

"I'm Azurael," the girl said in a soft, unsure voice, fiddling with the ends of her scarf. "I guard the first floor. Captain Gargamon initiated me. I was the first adventurer to survive going on a quest with the Captain, so he took me in as his protege."

Sybiler raised an eyebrow. She knew for a fact that Azurael wasn't as weak as she looked—she was level 100, just like everyone else here—but she hadn't expected her to sound and act so helpless too. Perhaps it was an act? He hoped not. That could mean her loyalty was fake as well.

Azurael shuffled to the back of the line, and two people took her place. They were two demons of some sort, one man and one woman, both with black curled horns and feathered wings sprouting from their lower backs. An incubus and a succubus, Sybiler would guess.

Although their facial features looked nothing alike, they shared a certain energy that reminded Sybiler that the two were supposed to be twins. The succubus was a classic feminine beauty, with large eyes, dewy lips, and the kind of curvy body that most men only see in their dreams. The incubus on the other hand was a pillar of masculinity, with piercing dark eyes, a chiseled jaw, and a toned body as hard and well-proportioned as a Greek statue. Both of them had carefully calculated outfits that showed as much skin as possible without breaking YGGDRASIL community guidelines. The clothes they did have, crafted of silk and dark leather, were arranged in a way that accentuated their most sensuous features, to the point where they would have looked less slutty if they were fully undressed.

The incubus and the succubus held each other's hands as they stepped forward. They seemed to squirm under Sybiler's gaze, to the point where she worried that their meager clothing would slide right off of them if they kept moving like that.

"I hope it's okay for my brother and I to go together, my lady," the succubus said in a low, sensual voice. "We have the same story, and neither of us likes being alone."

Now it was Sybiler's turn to squirm. After playing this game for years she was used to how these two looked, but watching them behave like this was a whole new level of awkwardness. She tried not to look directly at them. "Th-that's fine. Go ahead." If them going together would get them out of her line of sight faster, she was all for it.

The succubus bowed, at just the right angle for her cleavage to be on full display to Sybiler. "I am Cullena."

The incubus bowed as well, with the grace of a gentleman but the smirk of a troublemaker. "And I am Fellior. We are the guardians of the second and third floors. Lady Vulenvina initiated us both."

Of course they were Vulenvina's.

"When we were younger, we were sold into slavery." By the way Cullena handled the word, it was obvious what kind of slavery she meant. "We were bought by a man who was going to do horrible things to us…" She shuddered, and Sybiler genuinely couldn't tell if it was from discomfort or arousal. "We ran away, and Vulenvina found us. Now we're here."

"And we are very glad to be here, Lady Sybiler," Fellior said. Sybiler could have sworn she saw him wink.

These two were entirely too much. Sybiler didn't want to order the NPCs around any more than she had to, but demanding that these two put some more clothes on was quickly rocketing to the top of her priorities.

Next was Skrat. Although trolls were usually twice the height of a human, he had been magically shrunk to human size for convenience. He approached the throne with a swagger somewhere between that of a CEO and a rockstar. He wore a tailored three-piece suit, which sharply contrasted with his rough green skin and his oily strands of hair.

"Skrat at your service, my lady." His tongue, as thick as Sybiler's neck and twice as long, hung out of the side of his mouth and flopped about as he spoke. "My job is to guard the fourth floor, and to keep the rest of these hooligans on their toes!" He cackled. "Lord Eight=Dee brought me on board. I used to be a king, you know. But after I saw what Ars Solanum did with Ahura Mazda, I just had to drop everything and learn from the best!" He laughed again, louder and even more maniacally.

Sybiler couldn't help but grin at the story he mentioned. Ars Solanum had a long history of hunting down World Items, abusing them to pull off some stupid public prank, then releasing them back into the world for more serious players to find. This tradition of theirs was one of the only reasons other players didn't all team up to wipe out her trolling nuisance of a guild. It was always a big event when Ars Solanum got their hands on a World Item, and players would come from all over to see what ridiculous stunt they would pull with it; in fact, it got to the point where some guilds would willingly hand their own World Items over to Ars Solanum so they could watch the chaos.

Ahura Mazda was one of the World Items that the guild held for a short time. It allowed them to amplify an area of effect spell so it would impact every creature in an entire world, as long as the targets had a negative karma value. Most players were worried that it would be used by some hotshot paladin to PK every demon and undead player in Helheim. However, Eight=Dee had bigger plans. Helheim was still the target thanks to its huge population of negative karma players and monsters, but instead of dealing them damage, he cast a cosmetic spell that made all targets avatars change into carbon copies of Shibuya Natsuo, the endlessly memeable CEO of YGGDRASIL's parent company. For three whole days you couldn't go anywhere in Helheim without a pack of Shibuya zombies jumping out at you. It had been marvelous.

She got so caught up in reminiscing, she hadn't noticed the next floor guardian step forward. While Skrat had been shrunk down for convenience, Juggernaut the minotaur had not. He was an impenetrable wall of jet black fur and solid muscle. Even though Sybiler's throne was on a raised platform above all of the floor guardians, he towered over her, and she had to look upward to meet his solid red eyes. He slammed his massive ax down in front of him like a walking stick, so hard that is shook the whole room and made the metal baubles on her throne clatter. If she had been standing, she would have lost her balanced.

"Juggernaut," he grunted. "Guardian of the fifth floor. Sir Engwa's initiate. He got past me, now I serve the guild."

Sybiler wasn't sure what he meant by Engwa getting past him, but she was too intimidated to ask.

After Juggernaut was Kyaar the naga. She had the upper body of a mature woman, reasonably beautiful but not a caricature like Calluna was, and a thick serpentine tail for her lower half. Her entire form was coated with emerald green scales and draped with transluscent purple fabric held in place with bejeweled clasps. Her thin, forked tongue slipped out from between her lips and tasted the air as she thought about what to say.

"I am Kyaar," she said. "Guardian of the sixth floor. Lord Pertooee initiated me." She grinned; her mouth had no teeth except for two skinny, viper-like fangs. "It is embarrassing to admit, but my first impression was robbing him. But he believed my talents could be useful for so much more than petty thievery. Every day I am thankful that he gave me this chance to serve Ars Solanum."

She managed to bow deeply and slither away at the same time without missing a beat. The movement mesmerized Sybiler, but she pulled her eyes away and focused on the next in line.

YGGDRASIL may have been a fantasy-themed game, but there were no words to describe this next floor guardian except "robot." The four-armed mass of servos, wires, and smooth white plastic looked utterly out of place in this ancient-looking guild hall. One could be generous and argue that its design was at least similar to a knight, but its head looked more like a motorcycle helmet than a medieval helm.

"I am KCY-3445-X, codename, Anachronica," it said in a heavily digitized but vaguely feminine voice. "This unit was built, activated, and initiated by Lord F-Alder, for the purpose of guarding the seventh floor." It—she?—activated wheels built into her feet and rolled away.

Sybiler was surprised by the lack of an origin story for Anachronica, but when she thought about it, it made sense. F-Adler was always more of a sci-fi fan—abandoning YGGDRASIL for Furthest Reach had been his idea in the first place—and he never gave a damn about medieval fantasy immersion, especially when creating NPCs. SevenLink, on the other hand, valued that kind of immersion a lot, and had always been openly bothered by Anachronica's design. She probably hadn't put much effort into Anachronica's backstory, assuming she wrote one at all.

Now it was Caramel's turn to trot forward. "I'm Caramel!" she chirped. "Or Toffee, I guess, if you wanted to change my name for real."

Sybiler shook her head. "No, that's just around our guests."

"Okay! Well, I'm the guardian of the eighth floor. Lady SevenLink initiated me." She grew more quiet and thoughtful. "When my herd was dying of sickness, and I didn't have the strength to go on, she gave me wings and angelic powers so I could save them. I dedicated myself to the guild so I could repay her." And then, just as suddenly as it vanished, her loud energy returned. "Technically I've paid it all off already, but I like it here, so I'm going to keep serving the guild!"

Although her peppiness was refreshing, her words brought Sybiler no comfort. Caramel was only here because she enjoyed it, which meant that if Sybiler couldn't keep up an act, this girl would probably be the first to turn on her. She would have to keep an eye on her.

The second to last floor guardian was a red-scaled dragonkin clad in an intricate set of full plate armor. He held a large golden pike in one hand, and saluted with his other as he approached the throne. "I am Avalon, squire of King Kadiresan, who so generously initiated me. I am sworn to be the dutiful guardian of the ninth floor of the Verdant Underbelly." He had a noble British accent, and although he claimed to only be a squire, he spoke with the confidence of a knight. "My father, the Great Red Dragon of Vistethr, was a horrible tyrant, but Ars Solanum slew him and saved my people from him. And so, I have sworn my eternal allegiance."

Sybiler vaguely remembered that boss fight. At least Avalon didn't seem too fond of his dad, considering the guild apparently murdered him. She noted that Kadiresan got to be called King, rather than being a Lord or Lady like every other guild leader. That made sense, considering he was the original founder of Ars Solanum.

Finally, Nana shuffled forward. Although she looked ancient, she moved with the fluidity of a predator in its prime. "And I'm Nana," she said. "I take care of the cottage upstairs, and guard the entrance. None of you in particular initiated me, I don't think. I've lived in the Verdant Underbelly all my long life, and you all decided to keep me around." She gave a gummy smile and a warm laugh, like one from a proper grandmother.

Sybiler knew for a fact that that wasn't accurate. The guild had made Nana just like every other NPC here, she hadn't been in the dungeon when they cleared it. She hoped that misunderstanding was based on her backstory, and not based on lies. She still couldn't remember who exactly designed Nana.

With that, all of the floor guardians arranged themselves horizontally and genuflected one last time. "I hope you found our answers satisfactory, my lady," Beta said.

"Yes, thank you." That wasn't entirely true. She wanted to grill each one of them more about their backstories and capabilities, but what she heard here reminded her that SevenLink had a habit of giving every NPC a tragic, traumatic backstory. She'd already unearthed a few sensitive tidbits, like the death of Beta's parents or Calluna and Fellior's slavery situation, and the last thing she wanted was to cause a scene or make them all uncomfortable on day one.

"It was wonderful to hear from all of you, and I hope to get to know each and every one of you better as we move forward," she said. "Soon I want to discuss the sudden relocation of our guild base, but first…" She stood up from her throne. "Would it be alright with you all if I had some time alone to think?"

Sybiler had hoped they would enthusiastically agree like they always had, but this was the thing that gave the floor guardians pause.

"With all due respect, my lady," Beta said, "is it not improper to leave you alone? Your life is precious and you should always be guarded."

Hearing that made her stomach drop. Were they always going to insist on being around her? She would go insane at this rate. "I have to insist on it. If you're worried about my safety, I swear I won't leave the base on my own. I just need some privacy. So, no watching me from the shadows or anything, understand?"

The floor guardians didn't look satisfied, but they seemed to relent to the compromise. "As you wish, my lady," Beta said.

"Thank you. For now, please go back to your floors and make sure no one raids us." She stepped away from the throne and walked aimlessly towards the exit. "I'll… call you back when I'm ready."

—

—

Sybiler screamed.

She'd buried her face in a pillow to muffle the noise, and hoped that the thick stone walls of the bedroom blocked it even more, but her cry still rang out loud and desperate.

She had no idea how she'd managed to keep her cool for so long; the sheer surreality of this mess must have kept her detached from reality. Now that the pressure of the floor guardian's gazes wasn't on her, she was able to notice the crushing weight of everything else on top of her.

She was trapped here. Where "here" was, she wasn't sure, but she had no way of getting home. In a desperate ploy she had tried casting Gate with her apartment as the destination, but the spell had fizzled out. This wasn't California; hell, this wasn't even Earth.

No one would rescue her. Many assumed that someone like her would be valued by society because she was a trained nurse who even had the privilege of working in an acrology. The truth was, her enviable job only meant that there were a million aspiring nurses who would happily see her die so they could take her place. She wasn't truly valuable to anyone. Her family had stopped answering her calls after she "abandoned them" to pursue her education. Her clients may have been wealthy, but none of them actually gave a shit about her. The government certainly wasn't going to help some common worker like herself.

She dropped the pillow and rolled over on the plush bed. It was unnervingly comfortable, so soft and warm that it made her question whether she knew what those words meant before now. She'd never laid on anything close to this extravagant before, not even on that day at work when she snuck a nap on one of the luxury hospital beds reserved for rich patients. It sucked the energy out of her like a syringe extracting blood. She yearned for sleep, but even when she closed her eyes and burrowed into the blankets, she couldn't reach it. That made some sense, considering it had technically been only a few hours since she'd woken up that morning. It already felt like a lifetime.

Her body may not have been tired, but her mind was exhausted. What could be the harm in just lying here for a little while? The NPCs had been cooperative so far, she didn't see why they would object now.

But when she thought about it for a moment, she realized that quite a bit of harm could come from laziness right now. She glanced around the opulent bedroom. Everything was colored in velvety greens and rich browns, and all available surfaces were covered by a neat arrangement of golden vases and baubles. Her guild had never been huge on interior design, so barring necessary new spaces like the throne room, they had left the look of the Verdant Underbelly virtually unchanged. This room had been the Fey King's bedchamber. Being in there, she couldn't help but think about the Elf King that Deshan had mentioned.

If this world was anything like YGGDRASIL, then danger would be everywhere. That Elf King would be furious when he learned about what happened to the village, and it was only a matter of time before he showed up on her doorstep. Or worse, sent an army. What if they were already on their way?

And the threat didn't start and end with that Elf King. The Slane Theocracy sounded just as vicious, especially since Deshan had readily accepted that they could dish out a Super-Tier firestorm. Who could know how many other nations there were out there with the same level of firepower? Then there were the threats that weren't nations. Elder dragons, archfey, demon lords, demigods, any of them could show up out of nowhere like a random event and burn the Verdant Underbelly to the ground. She had a top tier PvP build, sure, but that didn't mean she could defend herself against bosses designed for a whole party to take on.

She gripped her hair and gritted her teeth. "Get it together, June." It felt strange, muttering her real name inside of the guild hall. She'd always made a point of keeping her real life identity a secret, and that included never saying her real name while in YGGDRASIL. She and the rest of Ars Solanum tended to piss off a lot of people in the game, and she'd heard too many horror stories of angry players screwing over trolls in real life as revenge.

The thought made her freeze. Other players. If she was here because she had been online during the server shutdown, did that mean all the other players who'd been logged in at the time were also here? If she had thought of this at another moment she might have been happy about not being alone, but now, all she could think about was her guild's terrible reputation. If she ever ran into another player, chances were they would assume she was just as mean-spirited as she'd always been in the game, and would try to subdue her immediately. Maybe even kill her.

Even with her solid build, she wouldn't stand a chance against them. She was alone. Meanwhile, a guild like 2ch Alliance probably had hundreds of players show up for their Goodbye YGGDRASIL party. If her life depended on it—and it very well might—Sybiler guessed she could maybe survive against two or three other maxed out players, but she wouldn't stand a chance against a full party of them.

On second thought, she had no reason to be so cocky about her abilities. If anyone from a PvP-focused top guild like Trinity was around, their build was probably just as good, plus they had three extra years worth of in-game knowledge and high-tier weapons at their disposal. She wouldn't stand a chance.

She decided that if she ever ran into members of those bigger guilds, she would have no choice but to surrender immediately and hope they'd let her join them. That could be possible with those two, especially if she could prove that she didn't mean any harm now that everything was real, but she couldn't say the same for some guilds. YGGDRASIL some hardcore, tight-knit guilds that tended to take the game very, very seriously; no doubt many of them played until the very end, considering how much time and money they sunk into the game over the years. Those were the same type of guild that tended to take the most personal offense to trolls like Sybiler.

Could players like that ever forgive Sybiler for how she behaved in game, or would they treat her the heartless monster they assumed she was? Maybe she wasn't giving them enough credit—hopefully they were functional adults able to separate a game from reality enough to know she hadn't meant any real harm. Still, she couldn't help but worry that they might try to exact justice. Or, for guilds she had personally pestered, revenge.

She went through her mental catalog of personal enemies. For the most part she was only slightly worried—Ars Solanum knew their place, and didn't often screw with guilds much stronger than themselves—but then she remembered those heteromorph weirdos from Helheim. Ainz-Gool-Something? She couldn't remember the exact name, but she remembered their vitriol. Those guys had always been too busy defending their guild hall from raiders and questing after materials to start a real PvP war with anybody, but after they fell victim to one of Pertooee's scams, they wouldn't stop raving about how Ars Solanum was filled with "bad faith players" who were "ruining the game for everyone."

In the past, she always scoffed at their hypocrisy. As if hoarding every World Item they could get their slimy hands on and then locking them away to never be used was done in the interest of making the game more fun for everyone. They were only a big deal because they wasted so much money at the cash shop, which wasn't exactly fair to the people who weren't lucky enough to have gainful employment. Those pay-to-win bastards were the ones who ruined games, in her opinion. But now, the thought of all those cash shop items and World Items being used on her made her want to curl up and die.

If any of them were here—if anyone like them was here—she was as good as dead.

Shaking with a new rush of panic, she stood up from the bed. She could see her avatar—no, her new body—in one of the large mirrors adorning the walls. Although she had seen this form in a million mirrors over her years of playing, the static expression and stiff movements had made it hard for her to accept her avatar as her own reflection on a philosophical level. Now she had no choice but to confront it.

When she first designed this body it was supposed to be attractive in a mature way, like she always dreamed of growing up to be back when she was a teenager. Almost ten years later, she wished she had aged this well. She had silky, dark brown hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, although it had grown a bit unkempt after rolling about on the bed. Her face, which she had modeled after a dozen different movie stars, didn't have a single mark or blemish across its tanned surface. The only mark of her Changling Fey racial class was her unnaturally blue eyes that shimmered like stained glass.

She wore an intricate set of studded black leather armor with nightshade vine patterns decorating the hems. This was her guild armor, custom designed to mechanically support her stealth-sniper playstyle and visually match her edgy assassin persona. She didn't want to change into something else, considering this was the strongest armor item she owned, but she couldn't deny how much it made her look like a supervillain. No wonder Deshan had tried to attack her on sight.

Right, Deshan and Tachel were still upstairs. Yet another thing she needed to deal with.

Sybiler sighed and examined herself again. She couldn't deny that her avatar had a certain gravitas that the real her lacked. Maybe that was why all of the floor guardians assumed she was some great leader. She straightened her posture and puffed up her chest. When she saw her reflection do the same, nausea bubbled in her gut.

She looked like a pompous evil queen. A tyrant. If she had someone who looked like her right now in YGGDRASIL, she would have sniped them down without a moment's hesitation.

That was the last kind of person she wanted to be.

As attractive as doing nothing sounded, she couldn't live with the person she was right now, which meant she had no choice but to do something about it. Sybiler the cruel, irreverent griefer had been a useful identity to escape into when dealing with work stress, but suddenly that escape had inverted into a prison. Now she just wanted to be June Maris again, the woman who worked her ass off her entire life to get into nursing school for the sake of others. The one who could deal with any patient, no matter how obnoxious or entitled, with a smile on her face. The one that other people like to be around.

Most importantly, the one would would give up everything, from her home to her comfort to her own safety, to protect people. If an elf army showed up on her doorstep today, all of the floor guardians would be in the line of fire too. She had to protect them. It was all she had to live for, at this point.

"Create Lesser Item," Sybiler said. As she cast a spell, a simple notebook and pen appeared in her hands. Taking notes had always helped her sort out her thoughts back in school. She sat down on the bed and began to plan.

—

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**A/N: Sorry if this chapter was a bit slower than usual, I've gotten to the awkward part where I need to transition from introductions to things actually happening. Things should start picking up in Chapter 5. Thanks to everyone who left a review!**


	5. Interlude: Bad Faith

_On the earth, in the sky, over the sea—all sentient beings must know of Ainz Ooal Gown._

Momonga—no, Ainz Ooal Gown—rose from his throne, having just given his orders to the denizens of Nazarick. They were to spread the name of Ainz Ooal Gown to every corner of this new world by any means necessary. If any of his former guild members were in this world, it was his only chance of reaching them.

He walked down the length of the throne room, his robes flowing dramatically as he moved with nobility and purpose. On either side of him, kneeling NPCs bowed their heads deeper as he passed, like the sea retracting before a wave crashes onto shore.

His announcement had gone well. He was starting to settle into this leadership role, and the fanatical energy that all his minions gave off was good fuel for his persona. That being said, they all had work to do. He didn't want his mere presence distracting the NPCs from their important duties. For now, he would retreat to his chambers to give them some space, and would do some more planning with the limited information he possessed about this strange world.

_I hope this isn't all for nothing_, he thought as he passed the banners of his guildmates. He felt a new pang of loneliness, but not just from missing his old friends—he'd been feeling that all day. For a moment, he missed his coworkers, his neighbors, the employees at the stores he frequented, even random strangers he passed on the street on his way to work. His brief visit to that village had highlighted how inhuman everyone in Nazarick was.

_It'd be kind of depressing if I was all alone here. The NPCs are loyal, sure, but it's hard to have a real conversation with them when they're praising me all the time._ He would have sighed if he weren't still trying to look dignified. _And life here for humans is so different than in Japan, I can barely relate to those villagers. It was like they were a different species._

Deep down, he knew the chances of another one of his guildmates being here were low. They would have needed to make a brand new account and happen to be logged in at the moment the servers shut down, and he couldn't think of a good reason why any of them would.

Still, there had to be other players who were logged in at the end, right? It was possible that this anomaly was unique to him, but there were plenty of players who were logged in until the end who could have been brought over too. Having anyone around who was from the Earth he knew would be nice, even if he'd never met them before.

Ainz Ooal Gown wasn't the biggest guild in the game, but they had a few claims to fame. The name of Ainz Ooal Gown was bound to attract more than just his former guild mates. He hoped that any other players who showed up here would be as lost and confused as he was, and would be willing to team up with him. He wondered how the NPCs would respond to something like that. Did they consider all players to be Supreme Beings, or only the members of Ainz Ooal Gown? He hoped that wouldn't cause a problem with loyalties.

Another issue crossed his mind. What if the players he encountered refused to be his ally? Heteromorphs were a favored target for PKing, so others from YGGDRASIL could see him as prey. He wanted to dismiss such a thing as ridiculous. After all, what short-sighted idiot would keep treating this like a game when real lives were at stake?

Actually, he knew exactly the kind of idiot would behave in such a way.

Not everyone who played YGGDRASIL was a mature, functioning member of society like the members of Ainz Ooal Gown. Many were petulant man-children—or literal children—who played the game for all of the wrong reasons, and had nothing better to do with their lives than ruin other people's fun and hard work. They had no respect for anyone around them, and always prioritized their twisted enjoyment over honor and fairness. There were a million terms for them and their various subspecies: trolls, griefers, scammers, hackers. Touch Me had always called them bad faith players, and Ainz thought of them the same way.

If any bad faith players found themselves in the same situation as Ainz, with real magical powers and an army of powerful NPCs at their command, there was no doubt they would abuse that position and sew mass chaos and destruction. They wouldn't have the emotional maturity to conduct themselves responsibly. It was also likely that a person like this would assume Ainz was a threat right away, and attack before any diplomacy could begin.

Spreading the name of Ainz Ooal Gown was a risk. He needed to be prepared to defend himself against bad faith players at any time—or even take preemptive measures against them, if he had the opportunity.

As Ainz reached his chambers, he decided he would later write down a list of all of the bad faith guilds he could remember. For now, only one immediately came to mind: Ars Solanum. His guild had many run-ins with that group over the years, due to their shared interest in collecting World Items. Few of those encounters had been pleasant.

He needed to list any usernames he could remember as well, in case they came individually. Among Ars Solanum, the only two names he could vividly remember were Pertooee and Sybiler. Just thinking of those names made rage flare up inside him, although his undead nature quickly suppressed it.

Those two were the worst of the worst. Through a combination of cheap tactics, broken spell combos, and lies that took advantage of Bukubukuchagama's good nature, Sybiler and Pertooee had unfairly snuck past all of Nazarick's defenses while most of the guild was off on a quest, without triggering a single NPC. Then, they broke into the treasury and stole 3 World Items right from under their noses.

In the end, Ainz Ooal Gown managed to reclaim all three of the stolen items. Ars Solanum members had a bizarre habit of discarding World Items after they used them for some inane prank, which Ainz was equally annoyed by and thankful for. However, that incident wasn't a sore spot because of any damage to the guild, rather it was a matter of his personal pride. He was the highest level member in the guild hall at the time of the robbery, and he was unable to stop the thieves from escaping. Not only that, but he still had no idea how those two managed to get into the treasury in the first place, considering the defenses he had personally designed. To this day he was convinced that there was hacking involved.

Whatever the case, that incident had grave implications if either of those two players had come to this world. Both Pertooee and Sybiler had intimate knowledge of the inner working of Nazarick, plus the ability to break in at any time they chose. That could easily be his downfall.

If he discovered either of them here, allowing them to live would be too dangerous to risk.

Some small, human part of him was horrified by the idea of literally murdering another player, but his undead mentality made it hard to truly care. He would make any sacrifice to protect Nazarick. He'd also be lying if he said he didn't want revenge.

He made a mental note to instruct his minions to warn him if they heard anything about Ars Solanum, Pertooee, or Sybiler. That was all he could do for now. Satisfied, he let his mind drift to other matters.

—

—

—

**A/N: Finally, some Nazarick! I'm sorry they haven't been more incorporated into this story as a whole, I know most people would rather see that than just some OC running around, but I'm not yet confident in my ability to write these canon characters well. I promise Nazarick will be properly folded into the plot eventually.**

**By the way, would people be interested in seeing game stat sheets for Sybiler and the floor guardians from her guild, or is that not the kind of thing you bother to read?**


	6. Appendix: Sybiler's Stats

**A/N: I haven't had much time to work on the next chapter lately, so here is Sybiler's stat sheet in the meantime! It goes into detail about her build, classes, and equipment. **

**At the end, I've also included an overview of how Ars Solanum managed to steal World Items from Ainz Ooal Gown. I saw that this detail caused some debate in the reviews (which was fantastic to see, thank you guys), so I thought I'd clear up what exactly happened. For those of you who think it would be impossible, I promise you it had nothing to do with Ars Solanum being a stronger guild than Ainz Ooal Gown, and everything to do with Ars Solanum being willing to lie, cheat, and hack their way to victory. **

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**Sybiler**

_One of the Nine Guild Officers of Ars Solanum_

**Primary Build: PvP Stealth Archer.** Sybiler's primary strategy involves striking enemies down with extremely powerful sneak attacks from the shadows. She uses her extremely high agility stat to dodge enemy attacks, making her low defense a non-issue. She supports her playstyle with high-tier debuff and illusion magic, as well as high mobility and infultration skills which she uses to find strategic vantage points over her foes.

While a build like this is terrible for tournaments where there are no places to hide, it's an optimal build for taking on other players in neutral, unregulated PvP zones. A World Champion like Touch Me would crush her in the arena, no doubt about that, but if she caught him off guard in a place where he wasn't expecting a fight, she'd have a solid chance at taking him out (though not a guarantee).

—

**STATS**

HP: 45

MP: 65

Phy. Atk: 100

Phy. Def: 30

Agility: 100+*

Mag. Atk: 95

Mag. Def: 75

Resistance: 85

Special: 95

Total: 690 + item bonuses

_* Her agility stat is naturally 100, but she has raised it higher than that using magic items._

Stat-wise, Sybiler's build is primarily focused on agility, followed by offense. Normally dumping physical defense like she did would be a death sentence for a player of her level, but she's taken job classes that give her defensive buffs based on her agility score. In short, she can't take many hits, but she can dodge so well that it doesn't matter. There aren't as many agility-based buffs available to cover defenses against magic, which lead to her investing in the magic defense and resistance stats. She relies on single hit KOs, so maxing her attack stat and having a strong special ability stat to fuel her archery abilities was a must.

—

**RACIAL CLASSES (3 LEVELS)**

**Human: 2**

Human was her starting race in YGGDRASIL. She only leveled it up once in her early game before focusing almost exclusively on job classes.

**Changling: 1**

In mythology, a changeling is what happens when a fairy steals away a human baby and secretly replaces it with a fairy child. It's one of a select few non-human racial classes that can be taken by human players under special conditions (other races like this include Bitten Vampire or Bitten Werewolf). Sybiler only took a level in Changling so that she could access the Feywild Trickster class, which had a fairy race as a prerequisite. It offers some resistance to illusions and some buffs to her own illusion spells, but that's about it.

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**JOB CLASSES (97 LEVELS)**

**Archer: 15**

Archer was Sybiler's first job class. She's always preferred ranged weapons in DMMORPGs, because she has great aim and tends to lose her cool when an enemy is right up in her face. She has achieved all possible levels in archer, meaning her bow and arrow attacks are exceptionally strong.

**Sniper: 5**

This higher-level ranged specialization allows Sybiler to strike down enemies from absurd distances, and also makes her long range strikes even more deadly.

**Soulskewer Archer: 5**

This rare and exclusive job class is only available to players who pass a rigorous sharpshooting quest, where they needed to kill an incredibly fast and aggressive monster without getting within 100 feet of it. Soulskewer Archers are able to imbue extremely powerful destructive spells into their arrows, which cost less MP than equivalently damaging spells from a mage, but can only target a single enemy. They are also able to bypass ranged and piercing resistances with their arrows.

**Assassin: 15**

As a player who enjoyed dispatching of her targets quickly and stealthily, the Assassin class was a must for Sybiler. It is the origin of many of her stealth abilities, as well as her counter-stealth measures.

**Master Assassin: 5**

Because assassination was so central to Sybiler's playstyle, she found it worth it to take a few extra levels in the Master Assassin extension, making her stealth attack skills even more powerful.

**Battle Acrobat: 10**

This class is what allows Sybiler to rely almost entirely on her agility instead of physical defense. It offers a range of mobility features, such as increased jump distance, enhanced climbing, and the ability to squeeze through tight spaces, as well as agility-based defensive boons that let her dodge everything from melee attacks to area of effect magic.

**Ranger: 5**

Because Sybiler had specific prey that she stalked, the tracking abilities of the Ranger were a useful tool in her arsenal. She also liked the utility spells it gave her to use with a bow, like Snare Strike, which restrains any creature her arrow hits with magical rope.

**Witch: 10**

Witches are a class of spellcaster that focus on inflicting curses. Its passive ability, Evil Eye, automatically inflicts a series of debuffs on any enemy that acts aggressively towards its user.

**Accursed Witch: 5**

Accursed Witch is a powered-up version of the Witch. It has a once a day ability that allows them to freeze any enemy in place for 5 minutes, if their HP is low enough.

**Seer of Fortune: 5**

Sybiler's favorite pastime involved tracking down the same player over and over again to repeatedly kill them until their levels were drained. For players who were too slippery for her Ranger skills to track, she used potent divination and scrying magic from this class. It can bypass anti-spying protections of 8th tier and below. The Seer of Fortune class was only available to players who won a round of YGGDRASIL's weekly item lottery. Sybiler always played the lottery, and got lucky once.

**Feywild Trickster: 5**

A fairy-themed spellcasting class specializing in illusion magic. Its best feature is its passive buffs, which not only mask your true HP, MP, stats and abilities from your foe, but can feed them fake information, making it very potent in PvP compared to normal illusion magic. A maxed-out Feytouched Trickster like Sybiler can even mess with another player's perception of their own stats, such as tricking them into thinking they have taken less damage than they actually have, impeding their ability to strategize. It was only available for a very short time during a special event, and not many people heard about the event in time. Plus, it was only available to players of level 80 and up, required at least 1 racial level of some kind of fairy, and was locked behind a challenge involving difficult riddles. Sybiler is one of only 38 players to ever get it. (Although it is rarer than something like the Eclipse class, that's mostly because of the limited time window; Eclipse would have been harder to obtain, and is more powerful in the traditional sense.)

**Craftsman: 5**

A general crafting class that allows for the creation of many basic items. Sybiler mostly uses this to restock her arrows, and as a prerequisite for the Artificer class.

**Artificer: 5**

A stronger version of the craftsman class that allows for the creation of custom magic items. It even allows for players to transfer effects from one magic item of Legendary grade or lower to any other item, as long as the other item doesn't have any magic effects on it already.

**Prop Master: 1**

Prop Master is an odd class, made for players who dreamed of using unconventional weaponry, like throwing playing cards like shuriken or hitting monsters with frying pans. It allows the player to transfer weapon properties and magic effects to non-traditional objects. Sybiler took a level in it so that she could use her various enchanted arrows as effective melee weapons in a pinch.

**Beast Tamer: 1**

The only reason she took this was because she likes having a pet around. Sadly, the pet she had back when she was active is long dead. Maybe she'll get another someday.

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**MAIN EQUIPMENT**

**The Big Bad Crossbow (BBC):** This oversized crossbow made of black ironwood was Sybiler's official guild-granted weapon granted to her by Kadiresan. With enchantments made to increase the firepower of non-magical arrow shots and greatly decrease reload time, the BBC was effectively a machine gun in crossbow form. It may not have had the range of her preferred weapons, but it was much better against large groups, making it her go-to weapon when collaborating with the rest of Ars Solanum on quests or raids.

**Pride and Humility:** Despite its naming scheme, this bow and arrow quiver set is not a World Item, though Sybiler jokes they might as well be one when she's using them. She has been endlessly modifying this weapon since she took her first levels in Artificer, elevating it from a common High Class magic bow to a Divine-level artifact over the course of several years. With the help and expertise of her guild mates, Sybiler imbued it with just the right combinations of enchantments, boons and curses to make it interact perfectly with her class abilities and build.

She often uses the bow, Pride, on its own when using her Soulskewer Archer spells because of the powerups it grants. Because the arrows from Humility, the quiver, cost so much to make, she only uses them together on special occasions. When using Pride and Humility together, under perfect circumstances where she catches an enemy completely off guard and gets full Sneak Attack bonuses, she can kill an average level 90 player in a single shot.

Going into the New World, Sybiler has 10 arrows in Humility. She isn't sure if it's possible to make more here considering the rare ingredients needed.

**Ancient Wildwood Bow:** This fairy-themed Divine-class bow isn't exceptionally rare for someone of level 100—it's one of the most common Divine-class bows in the game—but it's still a solid piece of equipment, and Sybiler's go-to weapon for day to day use.

**Ars Solanum Guild Armor:** This specially made studded leather armor is mechanically based on the Armor of the Kindkiller, which can only be worn by Master Assassins of character level 85 or higher. It gives her significant bonuses to stealth and assassination attacks, and provides a surprising amount of magical defense and resistance.

**Superior Quickling Boots:** A divine-class item that has allowed her Agility stat to go over 100.

**Brand of Ars Solanum:** Most well-established guilds make some kind of teleportation item, like the Ring of Ainz Ooal Gown, that allow them to move freely within their home base. These access items are a necessary convenience for guilds, but also inherently dangerous. There is no way in YGGDRASIL to restrict magic item attunement by guild membership, which meant that if any outside managed to get their hands on one of your guild's access items, they could waltz in like they owned the place and rob that guild blind. The members of Ars Solanum was particularly sensitive to this risk, considering they did this to other guilds all the time.

Instead of making their access item a ring or pendant or key, which could be stolen and taken advantage of, Ars Solanum used magical tattoos as their access item. Anyone with the Brand of Ars Solanum can teleport around the Verdant Underbelly freely. It is a tattoo of an eggplant on her left wrist, which she usually covers with gloves.

**Various Rings:** Like every high level PKer, Sybiler used the magic item that let her put a ring on each finger. She has a number of rings that she can switch between, most of them defensive, anti-divination, or meant to allow her to use items with race or class restrictions (like the Ring of Mastery Wand). She swaps them out often depending on the quest.

**Superior Looter's Gloves:** These gloves let her absorb the whole inventory of any non-player character she kills instantly, as a way of saving time when looting. They also automatically take the rarest non-custom item that an enemy player has in their inventory when she kills them.

**Inventory Full of High-Level Junk:** Between her Superior Looter's Gloves and her PKing habit, Sybiler collected a massive trove of random high-level items, which are currently gathering dust in her inventory and her guild's treasury. The other players in Ars Solanum would often drop their unwanted items in the treasury, so she has access to those too. Because Ars Solanum was much larger Ainz Ooal Gown in terms of members and most of them had Looter's Gloves, Sybiler probably has access to five times as many random items of Legacy grade or higher than Ainz does, although she has no World Items at this time.

**Jester:** The guild weapon of Ars Solanum. It's a pike with a tip that looks suspiciously phallic. Sybiler has no idea what it does or how it works, and is scared to take it out of its spot above Kadiresan's throne.

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**How Ars Solanum Broke into the Nazarick Treasury**

First, I should specify that this wasn't just a two man job. It involved four guild members collaborating:

\- **Sybiler**, who you know well at this point. She has a specialization in illusion magic that came in handy here.

\- **Pertooee**, the organizer of this operation. He was a player with a love of scams, trickery, and "social engineering."

\- **Vulenvina**, another female member of the guild who is known for being rather crude and hyper-sexual.

\- **F-Alder**, the best hacker in the guild.

Ars Solanum breaking into Nazarick was more of a feat of social manipulation than actual game skill. It started when Vulenvina struck up a friendship with Bukubukuchagama, based around their shared love of H-Games. Vulenvina pretended to want to break into the voice acting industry herself, and convinced Bukubukuchagama to meet her in a more adult-friendly DMMO so that they could talk more frankly about the subject.

While Vulenvina and Bukubukuchagama were chatting together in YGGDRASIL, Pertooee used his exceptionally high level thieving skills to pickpocket the Ring of Ainz Ooal Gown off of Bukubukuchagama without her noticing. (This is under the assumption that the policy to leave the rings of Ainz Ooal Gown in Nazarick was only implemented by Ainz after arriving in the New World. Guild members might keep it on them so they could fast-travel back to the guild on log in, no matter where they logged out.) Once Bukubukuchagama logged out to switch games with Vulenvina, the plan started in earnest.

Sybiler had high-level illusion magic that let her copy Bukubukuchagama's avatar perfectly, and was a good enough amateur voice actress herself to pull of a decently convincing Bukubukuchagama impression. So, she disguised herself as Bukubukuchagama and teleported to the ninth floor of the Tomb of Nazarick using the Ring of Ainz Ooal Gown. Although F-Alder couldn't completely hack into Bukubukuchagama's account, he was able to spoof it, which meant Sybiler appeared as Bukubukuchagama on other people's console and receive any messages sent to her. The NPCs reacted to her as if she was Bukubukuchagama as well.

Between her illusion, her acting, and the spoofing, Sybiler was able to walk right into the Great Tomb of Nazarick without anyone suspecting that she wasn't Bukubukuchagama. Much to her luck, half the guild was out on a quest at the moment. She was able to force her way through the door of the treasury using her Master Assassin infiltration skills, despite not knowing the password.

At this point she could have strolled right into the treasury and stolen everything, but it wasn't that simple. All of the World Items needed special keys to remove from their storage area. After she saw this, she realized that Pertooee was the only one with the thief skills to pick the locks, but she had no way of getting him in there.

Eventually, she decided to use some more trickery. Still pretending to be Bukubukuchagama, she tricked Momonga into giving her the password for the guild admin tools, claiming that she wanted to make some edits to her NPCs but she was locked out and couldn't remember the code. He was distracted with another task, and because the spoofing made it seem like this really was his friend, he gave her the code without thinking. Once she had that, she passed it onto F-Alder, who was able to use it to deactivate Nazarick's anti-teleportation defenses. Pertooee teleported in and got to work on unlocking the World Items.

Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time before Pandora's Actor noticed that there was an intruder in the treasury; unlike Sybiler, Pertooee wasn't protected by any spoofing. The NPCs attacked, and Momonga was alerted. Sybiler and Pertooee immediately teleported out of there with the three World Items they had managed to snatch in the little time they had, then told F-Alder to turn the teleportation defenses back on and wipe any trace of meddling from the Ainz Ooal Gown digital records. They also used pickpocketing to discreetly give Bukubukuchagama her ring back the second she logged back in, meaning she never realized it was stolen from her.

Thanks to all of these measures, none of the members of Ainz Ooal Gown ever figured out exactly how Sybiler and Pertooee pulled it off. The only reason they knew those two were behind the heist was because they later bragged about it on the community forums while posing with the World Items they stole. To this day, Momonga still hasn't figured out that the Bukubukuchagama that he spoke with that day wasn't the real one; although he's very experienced with the game, he doesn't know much about spoofing, and doesn't know it could be used for something like that.


	7. Chapter 5: Vegetable Stew

**A/N: Finally, actual content! **

**I don't want to spend too much more time dwelling on the whole Nazarick hacking raid thing, but there are a few concerns I wanted to address:**

**\- In regards to the poison traps, Sybiler would have had good enough resistances to bypass that; I left it out because I didn't think it was an important detail. I figure that if everyone in Ainz Ooal Gown could survive getting past it, any player of a similar level wouldn't have much trouble.**

**\- It may seem strange that Momonga didn't realize the Bukubukuchagama he was talking to was an imposter, but you'd be surprised what people can fall for when they're not paying attention. They only exchanged a few sentences and Momonga was preoccupied with something else at the time. As much as he cares about his friends, he had no reason to be suspicious, so he didn't double-check her identity or anything like that.**

**\- Based on what I read on the wiki, I assumed that the "no Rings of Ainz Ooal Gown outside of Nazarick" policy was something Momonga instituted after coming to the New World, not a practice that the guild followed before. I haven't read every light novel yet (so far I've only watched the anime and read volume 10), so I may miss details like this. For now I'll just say this incident happened before they agreed to leave the rings in their base. Sorry if I get anything else wrong!**

**I really do appreciate all of the feedback, though. I can't promise this fanfic will be perfectly accurate, but what I love about Overlord is that there's always more to learn. :D **

**In a similar vein, I am going to be taking a lot of liberties with the worldbuilding of Elf Country and the Slane Theocracy, since we don't know a ton about them (especially the former). I'll try to keep it as accurate as I can as of Volume 13, but I can't promise perfection.**

**Anyway, on with the story!**

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**CONTENT WARNING: GORE**

(at this rate I'll need to change the rating on this fic to M)

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Khiaki stumbled on rubbery legs into a tree and leaned against it for a moment, panting.

She was used to walking. The commander would make her and the rest of the troops march from sunrise until sunset several times a week, without so much as a break for lunch. It wasn't the distance that had exhausted her—it was the incline.

Elf Country was a flat expanse of dense forest for the most part, with maybe an occasional hill as you wandered closer to the mountains in the south or west, but the army spent most of its time on the northern and eastern borders they shared with the Slane Theocracy. There weren't supposed to be any mountains in the middle of the Great Forest of Evasha. And yet, here one was, right under her feet.

The mountain had appeared out of nowhere mere hours ago, just a few miles away from their camp. Moments later, a pillar of fire like the wrath of all the gods combined crashed down upon a nearby farming village. The scouts who checked on the village claimed that there was nothing left but rubble and ash.

Since they found no clues about who was responsible in the remains of the village, another team of scouts had to be sent out immediately to investigate the mountain. Khiaki was one of the two unlucky souls picked for the job. The commander claimed that it was because she was the most knowledgable about magic out of everyone in the squadron, but deep down, she suspected it was because she had denied the commander's drunken advances a few nights ago. He'd been cold towards her ever since that incident. She feared that this was the punishment she had been bracing herself for; if it was, it didn't bode well for her chance of surviving this mission.

_Don't come back until you find answers_, the commander had told her, with a viciousness that implied failure meant death.

She glanced behind her, out through the sparse canopy of trees towards the ruins of the village. The sight nearly made her collapse in dispair. She was here to find whatever entity was capable of such unimaginable destruction, and she got the feeling that if she succeeded in finding them, that would mean death too. Her heart was close to bursting in fear just knowing something like that was out there and nearby, so she couldn't imagine surviving an actual encounter with it.

That only left one option—desertion. She'd considered it many times in the past, but where was a traitorous elf girl supposed to go? Her own people would arrest her, demihumans would eat her, the Theocracy would kill her, and any other human society would have her enslaved. Not to mention the gods would torture her for eternity as soon as she was dead. Her only chance was to hide in some remote corner of the forest and live off the land for the rest of her life while begging the gods for forgiveness. The farther she marched up this mountain towards her likely death, the more she yearned to run off in a random direction, never looking back.

She clutched a tree branch, gathering her resolve to do just that, but a voice interrupted her.

"Did I say you could stop?"

Osto glared down at her from farther up the slope. The dark haired soldier stood on alert with his bow half-drawn, ready to shoot down any enemy agents—or any cowardly deserters who knew too much about Elf Country's military operations to be allowed to live. Khiaki swallowed hard. Unless she got unbelievably lucky, fleeing meant death too.

No matter what she did, she was going to die today.

"No, sir." She lowered her head in forced respect. Osto was only a common scout, but he was also a man, which meant women like Khiaki were required to defer to him. She let go of the tree, her legs still numb and tired, and kept hiking after him.

"Well hurry up," Osto snapped. "And pay attention." Although he was doing his best to sound commanding, Khiaki sensed the slightest waver of fear in his voice. He knew as well as she did that this could be a suicide mission. She wondered what he did to piss the commander off so badly.

They continued up the mountain, Khiaki always lagging a few feet behind the scout. It seemed like the slope was getting steeper and more barren by the minute. Soon they were spending more time walking sideways and searching for footholds than they were moving forward. Once they even had to climb up a near-vertical cliff face, leaving Khiaki with arms just as tired as her legs.

At this point, she had been ready to give up a dozen times already; now, only her fear of Osto's wrath kept her going. Just as she was seriously considering if laying down for a second could be worth getting beaten senseless, her bleary eyes wandered to something unusual, which snapped her out of her daze almost instantly. She stumbled forward to catch up with Osto, then tugged on the back of his tunic.

Osto turned around, beads of sweat collected on his tanned forehead. He seemed too tired to be annoyed. "What?"

Khiaki pointed to their left. "Are those stairs?"

He followed her finger, and his eyebrows shot up in surprise. Sure enough there were stairs heading up the mountain, made of well-worn stone bricks half submerged in dirt. Although they looked old, they also seemed well-trodden, and there were a few struggling plants growing between the cracks in the bricks that had recently been trampled flat. People had passed through here recently.

Immediately, Osto backed away from the stairway and back into the trees, pushing Khiaki back along with him. His eyes darted, scanning for signs of life or movement.

"It has to be this way," Khiaki said.

"We can't approach in the open like this," Osto replied, in a tone that made him sound like he was scolding a child. "If the enemy is this way, we'll be shot down!"

"I have an idea." She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and focused. "Camouflage," she muttered. A vibration of magic resonated with the word. Green energy crept over the two of them, and when it faded, their skin and clothing took on the colors and textures of everything around them: the speckled stone below them, the dull brown bark of the trees, the grey of the ash-choked sky. As they moved, the colors moved with them, ensuring that they would be difficult to make out from a distance at any angle.

Without another word, the two of them began creeping their way up the path. They both flinched at every slight sound or movement, but it always turned out to be a bird, or a squirrel, or even just leaves stirring in the light wind. They climbed for another half hour.

The slope was beginning to level out. From a distance, Khiaki had seen that the mountain rounded off as it reached higher up, almost to the point of flattening out into a dome, then spiked up into a narrow point at the very top. They would be reaching the summit soon.

Although she should have been paying attention, Khiaki found herself lost in thought, worrying about what horrors must await her at the end of this path. A monstrous fire-breathing dragon? A demon? Agents of the Slane Theocracy, perhaps even the Black Scripture itself? She was so distracted that she jumped and almost screamed when Osto grabbed her by the arm. He dragged her sideways off of the path and forced her into a crouch among some nearby shrubbery. He got onto the ground himself and leaned in close, practically whispering right into her ear.

"I found something," he said. He held out an intricately carved obsidian rod about the length of his forearm. It was a wand, and not like any wand she had even seen or used. "Tell me what it is."

Khiaki took the wand from his hands, carefully, as not to cut herself on any of the sharp edges that ran up its length. Even before casting an identification spell, she could feel vibrations of powerful magic ringing off of it. "Detect Magic," she muttered.

As soon as her spell touched the surface of the wand, she felt as if the ground had fallen out from under her. Inside the wand she sensed a great void, vast and incomprehensible, so deep and dark it seemed like it could swallow all the world with room to spare. She saw blotches of magical energy floating in it, each a ten times more potent than all the magic she herself had to command, yet in this vast emptiness they seemed to be little more than stains left behind by a much greater power. She knew with absolute certainty that this entire space had once been filed with world-shaking magic. One could have told her that a god lived in this wand, and she not only would have believed it but would have sworn herself to that god in an instant, out of fear of what it could do to her if she displeased it.

Worst of all, when she listened close, she swore that she heard a trickle echoing through void, heat and crackling power rising up like steam. The magic was regenerating. Soon, it could shake the world again.

A sharp pain slammed through her gut, yanking her back to reality. She doubled over and barely held back a cry. Osto looked down at her with startling intensity, and kept his fist pressed against her belly, as if to remind her to stay quiet. "Get a hold of yourself, girl," he growled. By the look on his face, he must have suspected that the wand was possessing her. Normally he would have slapped her across the face to bring her down to earth, but that would have made too much noise, so a punch in the stomach would have to do.

Measuring herself against Osto's steady hand, Khiaki realized that she was shaking violently, like a leaf in a storm. The handle of the wand she held was slick with her sweat—and her blood. She must have cut her palm on the dark glass while in the depths of that horrific vision.

"What is this thing?" Osto demanded. His scowl was stern, but his eyes were terrified.

It took her a long moment to find words again. When she did, she choked out the first thing that came to mind. "God."

"What?"

Realizing she was speaking nonsense, she shook her static-filled head and took a shaky breath. "A tool of a dark god," she clarified. "Nothing else could be this powerful."

"Is it…" He looked out over the forest, towards the scorched circle of earth that was once the village. "Did it do this?"

"Yes." She said it with absolute certainty. Ever since the firestorm, she had wondered what could possibly be capable of triggering such a catastrophe. Now, she knew. This wand could.

Osto turned away from her, staring at the ground, pensively. She almost wanted to drop the Camouflage spell so that she could better see and decipher the look on his face. He stayed like that, in solemn silence, for a long while; when he finally met her eyes again, there was sorrow in his gaze, as if he had given up on something. As if he knew it no longer mattered if he acted like the soldier he was supposed to be, because all of this was fruitless in the end.

He stopped pressing his hand into her stomach, and placed it on her shoulder instead. "You have to take this to the commander," he said. "Hurry, don't stop for anything, don't look back. I'll keep searching."

Normally she would have obeyed without question, happily taking any excuse to leave this accursed mountain, but the look on his face was almost like that of a vulnerable child trying his best to act more mature than he should ever have to. She feared for him. "But, sir—"

"A wand cannot use itself," he said simply. "Whoever used it could still be nearby. I can't return without answers."

"Sir, you don't understand." She gripped the hand that rested on her shoulder, tightly, as if she were ready to drag him away. "Whatever is at the top of this mountain could kill you in an instant!" Her panicked voice threatened to rise above a whisper.

He hushed her, then forced a wavering smile. "The gods are on our side, remember? If this is as important as it seems, they will protect me."

The logic of his statement brought Khiaki some small comfort. It was true that the elves lived far more holy lives than their enemies. Both Elf Country and the Slane Theocracy were home to God-kin, the divine progeny of the Six Grade Gods themselves. The elves had the piety and humility to revere their local God-kin, the Elf King, as their absolute unquestioned ruler. Meanwhile, the Slane Theocracy had the gall to put flawed mortals in charge of political affairs, and forced their God-kin to be tools of the military for the degenerate human "cardinals" to lord over. The gods would never stand for such disgrace against their beloved children.

Even though the elves had smaller numbers and inferior equipment compared to the Slane Theocracy, their defenses had lasted this long because the gods supported them in this war. Khiaki had no doubt that the gods were at play here; therefore, as long as Osto kept faith, he would have the advantage. Still, she could not calm her nerves.

"I can't keep you camouflaged if you go too far away from me," she said, in one last weak attempt to talk him out of it.

"I know," he said. They both also knew that stealth would do him no good, not against a foe like this. "I will face his head on, like a true warrior."

There really was no dissuading him. After mulling it over for a moment, she nodded. "Be careful, okay? Keep faith."

Osto nodded. He stood and returned to the stairs, climbing the final steps towards the top.

Khiaki watched him go, all to aware of the heaviness of the wand in her hands. It was hard to keep faith, knowing that something like this wand could exist, but what choice did she have? She took a moment to wrap the wand in a spare shirt from her pack, both to keep it safe and keep it out of her own sight, then set off down the mountain as quick as she could.

—

Tachel woke up to warmth.

Her breath caught in her throat. Warmth. It would turn to heat, heat turns to fire—

She shot up, throwing the thick blanket on top of her aside as if it were burning her. Cool air hit her bare skin. The sensation calmed her, almost enough to make her feel safe, but not quite. A knot of uneasiness still quivered inside of her.

Her vision focused. She was no longer in her home's half-collapsed basement; instead, she was in some cramped cottage, surrounded by baskets and jars of every herb she could name plus dozens that she couldn't. There was no houses in the village like this.

She looked down at herself. Now that she had tossed her blanket to the side, she noticed that she was naked—and didn't have a single burn on her. The mind-tearing agony she'd been swallowed by before was completely gone now, as if she had never gotten hurt at all. Had it all been a nightmare? Then where was she?

"You're up!"

Tachel jolted in surprise and whipped her head around to see what made the noise. Sitting at her bedside was a brown-haired elf, no older than she was, with a short, military hairstyle. She recognized that gaunt face immediately, and her stomach dropped.

Oh gods, not him.

She'd always been too intimidated to talk to Deshan, but she'd spotted him around the village many times over the past few years, ever since he was stationed there by the military as a guard. Never in her life had she heard of someone so blindly infatuated with the Elf King. Not a single innocuous "sin" or "blasphemy" escaped his notice, and he never failed to harass anyone who dared imply that the King, Elf Country, or the army were anything but perfect and pure in their holiness. At least, that's what her father had complained about to her.

Her father had impressed another thing onto her about army men—a girl like her being left alone with one never ended well. Women were nothing more than playthings to the King's men. Tachel was suddenly acutely aware of her own nakedness, and Deshan's eyes on her. She hurriedly grabbed at the blanket again and pulled it over her chest.

She expected Deshan to look disappointed at losing the view, but instead he blinked out of a daze and his cheeks turned beet red, as if he only now realized what he had been staring at. "I-I'm sorry," he stammered. "Would you… like some water?"

After bracing herself for the worst, this threw Tachel off balance. She nodded. Deshan was too busy averting his eyes to see her do so, but he was in the process of getting up before she even made the gesture; he probably would have fetched her water even if she said no.

Tachel readjusted the blanket around herself to be more secure, and examined her surroundings again. Where in the world was she? Deshan's presence made her think that she could be in military hands—a terrifying thought—but it was hard to imagine that this cottage was a part of any army encampment. Not that she knew much about armies. Where was her father?

A memory clawed at her from the dark recesses of her mind. When she was in the basement, moments before fire blasted down from upstairs like water from a flash flood, she'd heard a bloodcurdling scream from the floor above. There was only one other person in the house that morning.

When Deshan returned to her, she was shaking again. The memory of the fire had lit something white-hot in her gut, threatening to melt her from the inside out. She grabbed at the glass of water like a man lost in the desert and gulped it down as fast as she could. Physically it was refreshing, but it failed to extinguish the panic inside of her.

"It's alright," Deshan said in a soft voice, sensing her anxiety. "You're safe now. Nothing can hurt you here."

"My father," she said. Her voice was hoarse, but not as bad as she had expected. "Where is my father?"

His face fell, in a way that confirmed all of her worst fears. "I'm so sorry, Tachel," he said, voice barely above a whisper. "The village was destroyed in seconds. We are the only ones that made it."

Those words broke her.

Every misfortune that made up this impossible tragedy crashed down on her at once. She cried a sick, wailing, ugly cry, so powerful that she feared the grief would kill her. She sobbed for her father, for her home, for her few precious friends, for the boy across the street she'd always dreamed of marrying someday, for her lost past and lost future.

A few times she thought of something she cherished, something that could still be around, and she asked about it. Is the church still standing? Are the crops alright? Is there something left to bury? For every question, Deshan had the same answer: "I'm sorry." Every time he said those words, her heart broke all over again.

Deshan stayed at her bedside as she sobbed. At first, he was a steady presence, a rocky outcropping amidst a raging ocean. But after a while his resolve began to erode; he clenched his jaw to keep his lips from trembling and wiped each tear away before it could roll down his cheeks.

After a long while, Tachel ran out of tears, and laid on the bed in silence. Everything she ever loved was gone, and all that was left in its place was a dull ache in her chest.

"It was painless, you know."

Tachel looked up weakly at Deshan. He was staring down at his lap, fiddling with his own fingers.

"The fire came so fast, we barely felt it before our bodies burned away," he said. "No one suffered."

Confusion crossed Tachel's tear-streaked face.

"I died too," he said, answering her unasked question. "I was there with everyone else, when they were crossing over. They were confused, but they took comfort in knowing they had each other."

"Then…" She furrowed her brow. "How are you here? Am I dead too?"

He shook his head. "No, we're alive. An angel resurrected me, so that I could avenge the village. The same angel healed your wounds and brought you here."

"An angel…?" She vaguely remembered two figures hovering over her when she briefly awoke in the basement. She'd been too scared to really pay attention to them, but didn't one of them have feathery wings?

"Her name is Toffee," Deshan said, a dreamy smile crossing his face. "She lives here, with a few of her friends. There's a kind old dwarf woman, Ethel I think, and another lady…" He frowned. "I do not know her name yet."

Tachel could not pay attention to his words any longer, and let herself float into an empty daze again. There was only one lonely question left inside of her; she needed some solid answer, some bit of hope, to hold onto, and this was her last chance at finding that.

"What am I supposed to do now?"

"I'm not sure. However, it was a miracle that you survived how you did." Deshan smiled warmly. "The gods must have great plans in store for you. For now you should rest, so that you will be ready when they call upon you."

Tachel had never been a particularly religious person, but in her depths of despair, the sentiment was comforting. Maybe she should be more faithful.

A creaking noise caught her attention. She sat up and saw a wrinkled old dwarf woman with thin hair the color of snow emerging from a trap door. In one hand the woman held a burlap sack, and in the other, a bundle of cloth. She smiled when she saw the two of them. "Oh good, you're up."

She approached, and her expression morphed from contentment to concern, then landed on pity. "Oh, you poor thing." She handed Tachel the bundle of cloth, which unfolded into fresh undergarments and a simple cornflower blue dress. "You must be famished. I'll make you something to eat."

She hobbled over to a table and used a stool so she could reach its surface. She pushed a few baskets and bunches of herbs out of the way, pulled over a wooden cutting board and knife, and plunked down the burlap sack beside it. "Deshan, would you be a dear and chop up these vegetables for me while I start the fire?"

Tachel cringed at the word fire, but said nothing, knowing she was being ridiculous.

"Of course." Deshan stood with gusto, seemingly thankful for the distraction. Tachel was jealous and wished she could help, just to get her mind off of things, but she feared that she was too weak to stand.

Once she had changed into the clothes she was given, she watched as the two of them fell into a rhythm. Deshan sliced up the potatoes, onions and carrots with the swiftness and accuracy of a hummingbird bouncing from flower to flower. Ethel boiled a pot of water over a fireplace, then gathered and ground up a diverse collection of spices, which smelled heavenly even from across the room. Despite everything that happened, the scene felt oddly normal, and she found herself relaxing.

That fragile peace shattered when the front door burst open.

A tall, dark-haired elven man, dressed in the uniform of the royal army, stepped inside the cottage as if it were his own. Tachel was no longer alarmed when she saw who entered, but remained tense. Army men were permitted by royal decree to enter any private property they wished without warning, so barging in was expected, but the fact that one was here at all worried her. Deshan locked eyes with the soldier, and for a brief moment they shared a look of mutual understanding. Perhaps he was trying to tell the stranger that they were all friends here, and there was nothing questionable going on.

Ethel, on the other hand, did not respond kindly. Tachel could see her bristling in barely restrained anger at the unannounced visitor.

"Are you two from Maizen Village?" the soldier asked with a flat, serious tone.

"We are," Deshan said. "We're the only—"

"You both need to leave." The soldier stepped further into the room, his hand on his sword. "Now."

Frightened, Tachel started to get out of bed as best she could, but Deshan put out his arm to make her stop. "I'm sorry brother, but we can't. We're bound by honor to stay her until our hosts give us leave."

"And what of your oath to your divine King? Is that not the most important honor?"

He grimaced, as if the insult to his loyalty were a knife plunged into his chest. "These are good people," he insisted, gesturing at Ethel. "The King would readily approve of them. They saved our lives!"

The soldier scoffed, but without humor. "They didn't save your lives, they are the ones who risked it in the first place."

This took Deshan aback. He opened his mouth, but no argument came out.

"You're being awfully rude, young man." Ethel's words had none of the honey-sweetness they had before. Tachel couldn't see the old woman's expression, but she could practically feel dark fury radiating off of her.

"Don't play games with me." The soldier unsheathed his sword and pointed it directly at the old woman, with so much disgust in his scowl one would think he were dealing with a slug.

"Brother, what are you doing!?" Deshan barely stopped himself from jumping on the other man.

"Our troops found a magic wand directly down the mountain from this cabin," the soldier said. He gripped the sword with both hands and assumed a battle stance. "Close enough that it could have rolled from here, easily. It was a wand powerful enough to engulf a village in fire."

The soldier spared one last look at Tachel, and in his gaze was a hint of fear that betrayed his aggressive display. It was if he his eyes were pleading for her to run while he held the danger back. Seeing Ethel's sudden change in demeanor, she was tempted to do just that.

The door slammed behind the soldier on its own accord, as if blown shut by a gust of wind no one could feel. A maniacal cackle rang out. By the way Ethel's shoulders bounced, she seemed to be the one that was laughing, but the sound came from every corner of the room at once. It was as if the cottage itself were laughing at the poor fools inside. The room grew darker, and colder.

"You should of remembered your manners, boy." Her voice rumbled, more like one belonging to a demon than a dwarf. "Hold still now. The more you struggle, the worse it will be."

A vile grin swallowed up half of her face. Her old, yellowed teeth had been replace by rows of fangs as long and sharp as needles. Her skin bubbled, turning from peach to sickly green and growing dozens of unsightly warts. The soldier trembled, but pulled back his sword, preparing a strike.

Ethel lunged. The soldier tried to bat her out of the air, but she was too fast. He barely moved his sword an inch before she barreled into his chest. He flew backwards and slammed into the door with a deafening crack—Tachel couldn't tell if it was the wood of the door or his spine—then crumpled into a heap on the floor.

The dwarf-sized monster wasn't done. She rolled him onto his stomach and splayed out his limbs, so that his torso was only covered by the leather of his armor. The soldier groaned, but he was too winded and dazed to fight back.

She held up a hand, and long claws like knives sprouted from her fingertips. With one hand and almost no effort, she ripped the armor right off of him, exposing his stomach to the air.

"What a shame." A bit of her maternal tone was back, but it was a thin veil over the voice of an inhuman creature. "You're such a handsome young man, I could eat you right up." Her grin grew even wider. "Maybe I will!"

The soldier opened his mouth, perhaps to say something brave, but his words turned into a soul-piercing scream as Ethel drug her claws into his stomach. She raked downward from the bottom of his ribcage to the top of his pelvis. Blood and bits of shredded intestine bubbled out from the wide, deep gashes.

Tachel stumbled back against the wall, every inch of her skin turning ashen and pale. If there had been anything in her stomach, she would have vomited at the sight of the soldier's gushing blood. In that moment, she wished that she had died in that fire.

Ethel breathed in deeply through her bulbous nose, as if savoring the metallic scent of the blood. "Mmmm. Wonderful. You're just the secret ingredient I was waiting for." As she said this, the pot of boiling water was lifted into the air by some invisible force, along with all of the vegetables that Deshan had cut and the herbs Ethel had gathered. The ingredients dropped into the pot with a sizzle. Ethel clawed at the elf's stomach over and over, creating an open cavity where his digestive organs should have been. The soldier's screaming was replaced by gurgling and retching as fluids flooded his lungs.

Ethel stepped back from the soldier's body, her frock soaked crimson, and flicked her wrist. The floating pot of stew tipped and poured its contents into the cavity in his abdomen. His body convulsed as the boiling hot water dragged him through a whole new world of agony. Ethel laughed as the the man's shuddering grew weaker and weaker, and his diluted blood spilled out across the floor, until all the life was drained from his mangled corpse.

"YOU MONSTER!"

Tachel had been so shocked by the massacre before her, she hadn't noticed Deshan sneaking up on Ethel, brandishing his vegetable-cutting knife. He lept toward Ethel and plunged the blade right into her back. Hopeful excitement swelled in Tachel's heart; if Deshan was as good at using a blade in combat as he was using it to cut vegetables, he stood a chance now that he had the element of surprise.

As soon as the blade touched Ethel's skin, it shattered into a thousand pieces.

Deshan froze in place, the de-bladed knife handle in his trembling hand. All of the courage drained from him.

Ethel looked back at him with solid black eyes like dark pools of ink. She sighed and pouted. "Shame. And I had such high hopes for you, too. You seemed like such a polite young man."

She snapped her fingers. Thick vines sprouted from the nearest wall and blasted towards him like lunging vipers. They entangled him, binding his arms and legs, then yanked him back and pinned him to the wall. He kicked and struggled to no avail.

"YOU TRICKED US!" he shouted. "YOU'RE ALL DEMONS! YOU'LL PAY FOR WHAT YOU'VE DONE TO OUR VILLAGE! THE KING WILL HAVE YOUR HEADS—"

Before he could finish, the vines gagged his mouth tightly, reducing his ranting to muffled howls.

Ethel strolled over to him, arms folded behind her back. "Sadly I need to keep you alive, as my lady ordered." She made a soft, indignant huff to herself. "But I've got a feeling in my bones that she won't be showing you much mercy, once she learns that you tried to betray us."

Hearing that Ethel wasn't about to eviscerate Deshan wasn't enough to calm Tachel down, but it did clear her thoughts for a brief moment. She had no idea if she had to be kept alive to, but either way, that monster's attention was completely focused on Deshan at the moment. This was the perfect time to make her escape.

But how was she supposed to get out of here? The corpse of the soldier blocked the door, and considering it didn't smash open when he slammed into it, there was probably some magical force holding it closed. Her gaze drifted to a nearby window. It was small, but so was she; she was fairly sure she could climb out of it once the glass was out of the way.

She grabbed a pestle from a nearby table, crept over to the window, and knocked the pestle against the window pane. Although she tried to strike a balance between force and subtlety, the sound of stone against glass was too loud not to catch the others' attention. Immediately thrown back into a panic, she smashed at the window with wild abandon, shattering it into an open maw of glass-shard teeth.

She could feel the monster's eyes on her now. There was no time to clear out the sharp bits of glass around the edges of the window, but if she had to choose between getting cut up by glass or by that thing's claws, she chose the glass.

As soon as she reached her hand through the opening, she felt something serpentine wrapping around her waist. More vines. She scrambled, fighting with everything she had to throw herself through the window before she could be constricted, but it was no use. The vines tied her down to the wall by every limb. Her cheek was held a fraction of an inch away from a large, jagged shard of glass; if she dared move her head even a little, she would slice open her cheek, or even poke out her eye.

"Hmmph. You too?" Ethel gave Tachel a disappointed look. "At least you're not screaming."

She wanted to scream, desperately, but now all she could do was bite her lip and whimper.

Ethel's monstrous traits were beginning to fade away. Her eyes lightened, her skin turned back to a normal color, and her teeth flattened out. She was not completely normal again, however—she pushed off the ground and started floating a few feet in the air, like a possessed doll. "If you excuse me, I'm going to have some tea on the porch." She floated nonchalantly over the bubbling corpse to the door, but stopped before she exited. She glanced back at Tachel and Deshan one last time.

"Don't bother praying," she said to them. "Your paltry gods can't help you here. You're better off thinking about how you're going to apologize to the Supreme One for your insolence." She grinned, a cruel mockery of the kind smile she had worn before. "You'll wait here until the Supreme One decides what to do with you."

With that, she phased right through the door like a ghost, leaving the two restrained elves alone in the cottage.

Hours passed. It felt like days, but from the window Tachel could see the sun moving across the sky, and was able to track time that way. Her neck ached from craning her head away from the glass and the vines around her chest made it hard to breathe. Sometimes she would hear Deshan struggling and screaming into the vines, but often he was silent. The scent of the cooking herbs and fresh mountain air was turned acrid by the stench of boiling blood.

Many times she was tempted to drive the glass shard through her temple, end it all here and rejoin her father in heaven, but the fear of pain kept her paralyzed.

About an hour after noon passed, Ethel phased through the door again back into the cottage. Tachel didn't even dare to breathe.

The old woman's clothing was clean now, as if the bloodbath had never touched her. She hovered over the corpse, then fanned the air towards her nose as she inhaled deeply, as if she couldn't get enough of the aroma. She dipped a single finger into the bloody bowl of flesh that was once the soldier's stomach, the licked it clean. She hummed in contentment.

"Delicious," she cooed. "The secret to a good stew is always to let it cook long and slow." She muttered a quick incantation and the fleshy concoction began to steam again. "What a wonderful dinner I'll have tonight."

Finally, she turned her attention towards the two elves pinned to her cottage's walls. "Hang in there, you two," she said in an inappropriately chipper voice. "The Supreme One just called me to a meeting, so I'll tell her about what happened up here. It won't be much longer until your judgement." Her grin turned wicket. "I'm sure you're dying to find out what will become of out."

Deshan didn't bellow and thrash again—he'd long since run out of energy—but he glared death at Ethel, his whole body trembling with rage. She paid him no mind.

Ethel chuckled to herself, then floated down to the ground once she was out of the way of the blood puddle. She hummed a quaint little tune as she lifted the trap door open and crawled down to the lower level.

Tachel's dry lips parted, about to move in silent prayer, but then she remembered the woman's warnings. No god could help her now. Instead, she thought of how she would beg this Supreme One for forgiveness, and hoped that Deshan was doing the same.


	8. Chapter 6: Murder is Wrong

**So, it's been forever. I kind of overdosed on Overlord content and needed a break to enjoy other things. But now I'm back, and I'll be updating this story whenever I happen to feel like it. It's quite fun to write. I'm rusty on Overlord lore so there's probably even more deviations from canon than usual, but whatever.**

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The guardians of the Verdant Underbelly whispered in excitement to one another as they entered the throne room again. From the sound of the message they had all been sent, their master had a grand announcement to make. Maybe it was a new goal to chase or prank to pull. Or, maybe it was just changes to the Underbelly's defense plans. Whatever the case, they were all so starved for attention from the Supreme Beings that they would be thrilled by any command she gave.

Once they were inside, they all shut their mouths immediately out of respect. They walked towards the throne, orderly enough to seem professional, but not so neatly in a row that it would be unsuitable for a guild like Ars Solanum.

They quickly realized something was off, however. Sybiler's throne was backwards. Instead of their master, they only saw the wooden back of the chair. Upon closer inspection, they realized that the throne was hovering a foot off of the ground, on top of a Floating Board spell. The ones who peeked through the gap between the throne and the floor saw a black leather boot touch the ground and push.

With that, the throne spun around, revealing Sybiler reclining in it, her fingers intertwined, a sinister glint in her eyes. To any normal onlooker, such an entrance would have been hilariously campy, like a bad mockery of a Disney villain. Instead, the guardians were so overwhelmed by their master's splendor that they looked on with absolute awe. They were too transfixed to notice Sybiler gracelessly slamming her other foot into the ground to keep from overshooting on her spin.

Sybiler rose to her feet, holding her arms out wide like a raven spreading its wings. She snapped, and the Floating Board vanished, allowing the throne to drop. It hit the ground with a heavy thump followed by a metallic clatter. "Bow before me!" she declared in her best villainess impression. Her booming voice echoed through the cavernous throne room.

All of the guardians dropped to the floor and groveled like dogs.

"Eh?" Sybiler hesitated in confusion. This ridiculous, hammy entrance was supposed to lighten the mood; if she had done this in front of her guildmates, they would all be laughing at her expense and roasting her mercilessly. She had hoped that the NPCs would have a similar sense of humor, but it seemed they took her position as leader too seriously to recognize the joke.

Her hands dropped to her sides, and she sighed heavily. "Alright, you can get up." She tried her best not to sound annoyed—the last thing she wanted was for them to think she was scolding them.

They pulled themselves to their feet, still looking dazed and awestruck. Were they actually impressed by that? She almost wanted to laugh at them.

Sybiler sat down casually—well, as casually as one can sit in a throne. "So, I bet you're all wondering why I've gathered you here today."

"We are, my Lady," Beta said, again speaking for the group.

"I have an important announcement," she said. "One that might shock you a bit. I need you all to keep your knickers un-twisted until I'm done, alright?"

They all nodded and leaned in slightly, like excited children waiting for a story.

"From this day forward, the YGGDRASIL branch of the guild Ars Solanum is officially disbanded," she announced.

She could already see their expressions switching from shock to horror, but she was ready for that.

"Before you panic, I'm not leaving and none of you have to leave either. None of us know where we are and this here is all we have, so I think it's best if we stick together." She waited for the tension to leave the crowd before continuing. "But, Ars Solanum as an organization is being retired. We aren't going to call ourselves by that name anymore."

"How come?" Caramel asked.

Sybiler hadn't expected any of them to question her on the decision, or if one of them was going to, she thought it would be Beta. Maybe disbanding the guild also disbanded the hierarchies that came with it? The idea of them finally treating her like an equal both scared and relieved her. Survival might be harder that way, but god, would talking to them be so much less awkward.

"How do I put this…" She scratched her chin, pondering the question. "Ars Solanum had a lot of assholes in it, myself included, and we pissed off a lot of people. If any of our enemies hear that Ars Solanum is around, they might show up and get their revenge."

"If they do, we can chase them off and teach them a lesson," Beta said. "Like we always do."

Sybiler pursed her lips. Right, none of them noticed that the world suddenly became real, since it was always real to them. She couldn't bring herself to tell them the truth, both because she didn't want to tell them that their existence had been a lie up until this point, and because she didn't know where to begin explaining something like that.

"I can't tell you exactly why, but this place we've found ourselves is different than the world we used to know," she said, choosing her words carefully. "Here, the consequences of killing people are much worse. That means people are going to be way angrier about what our guild tends to do, and it'll be a lot worse for us if one of us gets killed."

"Is that because it's so hard to resurrect people?" Caramel asked.

Sybiler nodded. "Exactly. Before, anyone we offed would just respawn after a while, or one of their friends would resurrect them right away. But here…" Her stomach churned as she thought about that entire village she vaporized. "Dead means dead."

Rather than shocked, the NPCs just looked on blankly, like they didn't get what the big deal was. Maybe she had to put this in terms they could understand.

"Remember when I left for three years? Now, imagine that was because I was dead, and I never came back. I'd just be gone forever." They all seemed clearly uncomfortable with the idea, and she gave it a moment to sink in. "That's why killing is bad here."

"But no one else is as important as you, my lady," Beta said. "Why would it matter if they die forever?"

Did she seriously need to explain why killing was wrong to this man? His words disgusted her deeply. She was almost tempted to kick him out of the Verdant Underbelly for that attitude, but setting him out on a murder spree before she corrected his warped worldview was a terrible idea. "Maybe not to you, but they are that important to someone else out there. We like to annoy people, sure, but causing that kind of misery is way too much. I like to think we have standards."

She paused and steadied herself. "I'm sorry, we've gotten off track. We'll talk ethics later. Right now, immediate next steps. Step one, officially disbanding Ars Solanum to keep from drawing attention. Step two—"

She was interrupted by Caramel stretching her hand up into the air excitedly, like a child hoping to be called on in school.

"Yes, Caramel?"

"If we're not Ars Solanum anymore, what should we call ourselves?" she asked. "We need a good name, don't we?"

Well, if it would keep them all from getting stuck on the retirement of the Ars Solanum name, she was all for it. "True. I don't know… those assholes in that mountain over there," she spitballed. "Any ideas?"

"Taitmot… It could work." Kyaar said, pondering the option. It took Sybiler a moment to realize that T.A.I.T.M.O.T was the acronym of "those assholes in that mountain over there" pronounced as a name.

"If we change mountain to tall hill, we can make it Tait Thot," Scrat suggested, a gleeful smile on his ugly green face. His suggestion got quite a few giggles from the other floor guardians. It was middle school grade humor, but Sybiler was struck by how similar it was in both content and delivery to the dumb jokes her old friend Eight=Dee, Scrat's creator, often made. Either SevenLink had perfectly captured Eight=Dee's humor in the backstory she wrote for Scrat, or the NPCs had inherited more from their creators than whatever was in their code.

Sybiler found herself laughing at the joke too, less out an an actual appreciation for it, and more out of her loneliness being relieved. When she closed her eyes and listened to the soft laughter in the room, she could almost believe that she was back in Furthest Reach with her real guildmates. As stupid as that was for a guild name, the NPCs seemed to like it, and she couldn't resist playing along for more laughs like this.

"Make that super tall hill," she said. "Tait's Thots. All in favor?"

All hands went up, except Juggernaut—his creator Sir Engwa had always been a humorless bastard—and Anachronica, who was a literal robot.

Sybiler pulled a random low-level dagger out of her inventory. "Majority rule. Motion carried." She banged the butt of the dagger on the arm of her throne like a gavel. "I don't know who Tait is, but we are all his thots on this blessed day."

More laughter and smiles from the crowd. If Sybiler ever had to do something public-facing, she would need to come up with a more respectable name, but that working title was fine for now internally. Anything to lighten the mood around here.

Once the chuckling calmed down, she continued. "And now, our second order of business. Just like how Ars Solanum is a dangerous name to have floating around, so is Sybiler. I have a lot of enemies and I don't want anyone targeting all of us over that. Don't use that name for me anymore."

"Yes, my lady," Beta replied. At least he accepted it readily.

"Instead, call me June," she said. She wasn't going to let the identity of Sybiler trap her any longer, and if she wanted to escape it, she had to escape the name first. June represented the half of her life she was much more proud of. Besides, it was the only other name that she was used to responding to.

Caramel gasped with joy. "That's such a pretty name!"

"We understand, Lady June," Beta said. The other floor guardians nodded in affirmation. It was weird to hear her real name come out of Beta's mouth, but June figured she would get used to it.

"The lady part really isn't necessary," she added, a bit of embarrassment making her voice waver. "Just June is fine."

That made Beta reel in surprise far more than changing her name did. "Are you sure, June?" He forced the name out of his mouth. "That doesn't feel… proper."

June smirked. "Since when have we been proper around here?"

She had hoped for some more joking around from the floor guardians, but it was too much to expect of them. Beta huffed, his face tensed up into a forced neutral expression, and all of the others shifted uncomfortably.

Never mind. This was far more awkward for her than being called Lady.

"I mean, you can still use Lady if you _really_ want to," she said. "It's a free country."

Beta grinned and bowed. "Thank you, my lady!"

June held in an exasperated sigh. It was still weird, but if it really meant so much to them, she could cope.

"Anyway, I don't want to hear the name Sybiler leaving this base. Got it? Good. Next order of business." She cleared her throat. "Until we figure out where the hell we are and what the fuck is going on, our number one priority needs to be staying out of trouble. I know that we're no good at that, but this is a matter of life and death."

"My lady, could you define trouble?" Skrat asked with the eagerness of a troublemaker looking for a loophole.

"No messing with anything outside this base," she said. "And no screwing with the locals. We've landed in an unknown country, and we have no idea what their military strength is or what might provoke them. The last thing I want is to have an army on our doorstep, or for us to start an international incident. Oh, and no killing anyone." She felt ridiculous specifying that, but apparently it was necessary.

"Hmm… can I mess with people inside this base?" he asked.

"As long as they aren't our guests." She got the feeling that curbing Skrat's destructive instincts was going to be impossible, but at least she and the other floor guardians could understand his pranks. "Speaking of which, we have a couple of elf guests upstairs. We can't let them leave, but we need to treat them with respect, alright guys?" Saying that made ugly guilt bubble up inside of her, but she swallowed to push it back down.

That declaration was followed but a subtle, unwelcome sound. Her passive abilities must have enhanced her senses, because she managed to pick up a shaky breath from the back of the room no louder than the flap of a butterfly's wing. She craned her neck to see where it came from; it was Nana, whose face had turned so lily-white one might think she turned undead.

June knew she should have said something, but her words failed her, and instead she simply stared in concern. The guardians followed her gaze, and soon the whole room was staring at the old woman. Nana gulped, so hard is shook her whole body.

"My lady." Her voice was hoarse, in a way that made June's own throat hurt. "There has been an… incident upstairs."

Beta narrowed his yellow eyes at her. "Why didn't you inform us before?"

"I thought it was of no consequence. But…" She stared at the stone floor and fidgeted. "It seems I misjudged the situation." Her voice trailed off. The quieter she became, the more fear June sensed in her, like darkness encroaching as dusk turned to night. "Terribly misjudged."

— — —

June scrambled up the rough wooden ladder to the cabin and slapped the trap door open from below with so much force, it almost flew off its hinges. She nearly lost her grip and fell when the air of the room hit her. The pleasant odor of herbs and spices had been overpowered by the acrid stench of blood, so thick that it felt like her lungs were filling with iron.

She hauled herself up into the room with some difficulty. Several of the spots she grabbed along the floor's edge were slick and slippery, forcing her to readjust her grip a few times. Only when she got to her feet and noticed the deep red stains on her palms did she realize what those wet spots were.

When Nana had confessed what happened, June had imagined something out of one of those old crime procedural shows she used to watch while she did her homework. Some broken pieces of glass, a few tasteful red splatters, and a tidy, PG-13 corpse slumped against a wall. Instead, she saw a scene out of a slasher film. Fresh blood was sprayed everywhere, reaching places it should never have reached, like the aftermath of some twisted kindergartener's splatter paint project. Ground spices spilled from broken pots mixed with the blood into a muddy slurry that squelched under her boots.

June's eyes locked onto the mangled corpse. Chunks of soggy matter that she couldn't bear to identify floated in the blood that pooled in its eviscerated stomach. Unspeakable agony was still etched into its pale face.

Before today, she'd always thought she could handle blood and innards. She was a nurse, after all, and if she could have afforded more schooling she would have happily majored in surgery. But this violence, the suffering that lingered in the air, was far too much. She retched and turned away.

"Caramel!" she shouted, nearly pleading, her voice strained.

The centaur didn't need further explanation. She hurriedly trotted over to the corpse and began chanting, her hands clasped in desperate prayer. June hoped to hear coughing and wheezing as the body returned to life, but instead all she heard was Caramel's tired sigh.

"The soul has passed on already," she said, defeated. "I-I'm so sorry."

June wanted to tell her it was alright, but this wasn't alright. Another person was dead.

Rage and disgust burned in her throat. All she wanted to do was tell Nana to leave, get out, never come back. She was a second away from doing just that, until she thought about what might happen if a monster like her was unleashed onto whatever world was out there. She held her tongue.

It crossed her mind to kill Nana. The old hag was barely level 50, easy to slay in a single shot with the right weapon. And it would be fair, wouldn't it? An eye for an eye, a life for a life.

But no, she couldn't. There was no telling how the other NPCs would react. Besides, enough people had died today. She wouldn't be the one to add another body to the pile.

More soft muttering from Caramel brought June back to earth. The cleric was praying and waving her hands over the body. Although it remained pale and motionless, the deep, bloody gouge in its torso healed over and holy magic washed over it. Even the bloodstains vanished, perhaps from some magical cleaning effect. Soon the elven man's cause of death was indiscernible. Caramel reached down to his face, gently coaxed his eyes shut, and lifted him off of the ground with care.

It was almost worse, now that the corpse was repaired. Before, it was just a body. Now, it looked like a real person, with hopes and dreams and a future, all stolen from him. June looked away.

"I can bury him…" By Caramel's tone, she knew it wasn't enough, but it was all she could offer.

June nodded. Or maybe she didn't. The shock of everything was so much, she was barely aware of her own body.

Caramel looked over to the side of the room. "Do elves prefer burial or cremation?"

At first, June thought Caramel was asking her. She glanced up and around in confusion. That's when she noticed Tachel, pinned to the wall, smothered by rope-like vines like a insect in a spider's web. Her head was halfway out of a shattered window, and blades of broken glass sat dangerously close to her cheeks. Her whole body trembled, save for her head, which she didn't dare move.

"Oh my god." June gawked at the scene, barely believing her eyes, before a pathetic whimper from Tachel pushed her into action. "Shit!" She leaped over a table, not caring as a few jars of herbs smashed against the ground, and ran to the girl's side.

"I am so sorry, I am so, so fucking sorry. We're going to get you down from there, okay?" June reached to grab her, but hesitated, not sure how to unravel her from the vines without the glass hurting her.

Nana's unwelcome voice sounded from behind her. "My lady, she was trying to escape—"

Never did June think that such a gentle, motherly voice would evoke such rage in her. She whipped around and glared at Nana. "Yeah, no shit!" she shouted. "After what you did I can't fucking blame her! Do you even—"

June cut herself off when she felt Tachel flinch next to her. She steadied herself against the wall and let out a shaky sigh. "Look, just let her go. Safely."

"At once, my lady." With her head bowed, Nana flicked her fingers, and the vines around Tachel pulled her away from the wall and set her down onto the ground. Even as the vines loosened, she didn't move—she stayed on the ground, quivering.

"Should I let him go as well?" Nana asked.

Only then did June notice Deshan tied up to the other wall. His body was shaking too, but not in fear. He stared her down with bulging, furious eyes, and although his mouth was tightly gagged with a vine, his nostrils flared with every forceful breath he took. The moment her eyes met his, he lurched forward against his restraints in a futile attempt to lunge at her.

June was used to people being angry with her. The targets of her trolling shouted obscenities at her all the time, and the wealthy pricks she dealt with at work weren't known for their kindness towards the working class. But that look in Deshan's eyes was something else entirely. That wasn't annoyance or offense or frustration—that was genuine murderous intent. June knew that she could beat him in a fight, but those were the eyes of a man who would rather die trying to kill her than ever forgive her.

Worst of all, she deserved it.

June shuddered. She raised her voice to Nana, but didn't look her in the eye. "Just… let him talk."

"Yes, my lady." With another wave of the dwarf's hand, the vine in Deshan's mouth retracted. He opened and closed his mouth to stretch out his sore jaw, but his glare didn't leave June.

June stepped closer, her hands raised and open in front of her. "Deshan, I am so sorry, this wasn't supposed to—"

The moment she was close enough, Deshan spat in her face. In reflex she darted back, avoiding the brunt of it, but a drop of cool spittle splashed across her cheek.

"Go on. Let me down." He grinned, but the fury in his eyes didn't change. "I dare you."

"Deshan, please, just listen—"

He continued like he didn't even hear her. "I know what you did to the village. The gods know too, and they will see you punished for it." His empty smile vanished. "I can't believe I ever swore myself to a monster like you."

"How DARE you!?" Caramel puffed her chest up indignantly. "The gods smile upon her ladyship!"

"Caramel!" June snapped. "Leave him be." After everything that happened, the last thing she wanted was to antagonize Deshan any further.

"I swear a new oath." Deshan raised his head, a dreadful look of determination on his face. "I will not rest until I kill you. And if I cannot best you, I swear on the glory of all the gods that MY VENGEFUL SPIRIT WILL HAUNT YOU UNTIL YOUR FINAL MISERABLE DAY!"

Frigid silence washed over the room. His passionate fury sent chills running through every nerve in June's body and twisted her gut, to the point where she wondered if his declaration laid a real curse on her. Or perhaps the feeling was just guilt and shame, potent enough to consume her from the inside out.

With all of this pain swirling inside her, the weight of her NPC's gazes was too much to bear. She couldn't stand for anyone to see her like this; even more, she couldn't bear the thought of any of them defending her further.

"All of you." She tried to raise her voice, but it caught in her throat. "Leave. Go downstairs. Don't watch."

Caramel stepped forward. "But, my lady—"

"GO!" All her stress burst forth in that single screamed word. The NPCs reeled as if they had been stabbed through the chest. Without another word they scrambled for the trap door, stepping on and over each other as they threw themselves down to the lower floor.

The door shut behind them, leaving June alone with the elves and her worried thoughts.

There were only three outcomes to this.

One, she kills Deshan, an act she would never be able to live with.

Two, he kills her. That might not even be possible.

Three, he goes and gets reinforcements, and the whole Verdant Underbelly is invaded by some elven king's army. She and all of the NPCs would die. As guilty as she felt and as disgusted with them as she was, the thought terrified her.

There had to be some way to break through to Deshan.

Frazzled and frantic, she flipped through her list of spells in her mind, looking for a drop of inspiration. Her Feywild Trickster class did give her a few high level charm effects. Sure, she could break his will and turn him into a good little mind slave, but that almost sounded worse than killing him. Her lower level charms, simply meant to make game NPCs more friendly and cooperative, all failed against creatures that were already hostile. If Deshan wasn't hostile, she didn't know what the word meant.

Running out of options, she turned to the trove of random items in her inventory. She thought her hoarding tendencies might be a blessing, but as she scanned the thousands upon thousands of random items she'd collected from her PKs, she realized it was more of a curse. She couldn't remember what most of these things did.

And then, just as she was losing hope, she found something. An idea took shape.

An exceptionally stupid idea.

As she mulled over just how stupid it was, how likely it was to get her killed, she stretched out her hand and grabbed it through the portal to her inventory. This was the only path besides giving up that she could ever live with. It was worth a shot.

Deshan's look of determination faltered for a moment when he saw the object in June's hand. "What tortures do you have planned for me, demon?" His voice was shaky and breathless.

"No torture. I'm not going to hurt you, I promise. I swear on my life." She looked at the two gleaming silver circlets she held in her hand. Both of them were etched with shallow swirls and had pink, oval crystals embedded into the front of them. "I just want to talk."

He gritted his teeth. "You'll get nothing from me."

June sighed heavily. "You don't need to say anything. I just need a chance to explain. You… deserve to know why all this happened. After that, I'll let you and Tachel go, and you can do whatever you want."

"I will kill you," he said. It was a promise, not a warning.

June shrugged. "And I won't stop you from trying. I won't hurt you."

"Fine. Explain." He glowered, his body tense, readying himself for his moment to strike.

June placed one of the circlets on her own head, then placed the other over Deshan's. He flinched slightly, but did not pull away. June had to give the elf credit. Considering he expected to be tortured, he faced it with remarkable bravery.

Lucky for him, this was far from a torture device—it was a silly utility item called a Circlet of Sharing. In YGGDRASIL, all it did was allow users to share their account's screenshots and video captures with each other. Without access to her console, she wasn't sure what photos and videos she had, but maybe the item could be a little more flexible here. The item description said it was used by wizards to share memories, and maybe that flavor text carried some weight in a place like this.

"I didn't mean to hurt anyone." She closed her eyes and focused on the last moments of the game—standing on the porch, looking out over the empty, poorly rendered landscape. "I'm not from here. I don't know how I ended up here, or how this mountain got transported here."

The circlet tingled against her forehead. She opened one eye and peeked at Deshan. His eyes were closed and his brows were furrowed; clearly he was experiencing something too. She would have to trust that the item was working.

"When I fired the wand, I thought it would just hit empty space. No one was supposed to be there. And then…" She showed him the speech she gave to her floor guardians, the moment she fired the wand, the way that little bead of light arced through the air and over the mountains. And then, how the old world vanished in the blink of an eye, replaced by the flat expanse of this new world. She cut the clip off just as the clouds began to gather.

Still, it played in her own mind. She shuddered as she remembered the blackened sky and pillar of all-consuming fire.

A sob rose in her throat. "T-there weren't supposed to be people there. When I realized it was all real, I tried, I tried to fix it…" She pushed on through the shame, sharing how she ran down to the village as fast as she could, wandered through the ruins in a daze. She showed him how desperately she had dug through the rubble to find survivors. The disembodied hand. The moment she vomited.

To share all of that was humiliating, agonizing, but she had no other choice. This was the only way he might understand. She hoped that he could not only see and hear, but feel those moments the way she felt them.

"I tried to fix my mistake. I tried to bring everyone back, but their souls weren't strong enough for resurrection magic. You and Tachel were the only ones Caramel could save. I never meant for this to happen."

She took a quick glance at Deshan to gauge his reaction—then looked away when she saw how cold and blank it was. This wasn't working. Of course, even if she were firing into an open forest, how could she be so careless? Elves lived in the forest after all, and had that firestorm stayed in YGGDRASIL, it would have roasted a few dozen elf NPCs standing around. And none of this excused what Nana had done.

Maybe this was a lost cause, but she couldn't bring herself to stop trying.

"I know firing that thing at all seems stupid," she continued, "but where I come from, things are different. Death is different. When someone dies in YGGDRASIL, they don't—" she swallowed hard. "They don't go away forever, they just come back after a minute. It was a mild inconvenience at worst. I killed my friends all the time as a joke—hell, they killed me all the time! And I laughed about it! It was all just a stupid game, none of it was supposed to matter!"

As she blathered, Jade flooded Deshan's mind with images of her time in YGGDRASIL—first, a time she spawn-sniped a player and watched them reappear a few moments later. Not the most honorable of kills, but showed how impermanent death was.

Then, Pertooee killing Vulenvina with an explosive "whoopie cushion" on her throne, and her storming back in right after to playfully give him a piece of her mind. Everyone in the room was laughing.

Finally, Jade showed herself dying, with a paladin's enchanted blade buried in her virtual stomach. This past version of her cursed and grumbled as she watched the slow countdown timer to respawn. She then reappeared in the throne room of the Verdant Underbelly, healthy and unharmed, though still peeved about the haughty "gg" her foe had messaged her.

"And the NP… my companions, they've never known death any other way," she said. "They were just a part of the game. They're trained to defend this place, and as far as they know, killing just means getting someone out of your hair for a little while. They don't understand why it's bad. But I swear, I'm going to get them to understand, and I'm going to make sure no one else gets hurt, okay?"

Exhausted, Jade's shoulders and head slumped. She removed to circlet from herself. "Just.. I beg of you. Give me another chance."

Deshan said nothing.

He had held up his end of the bargain, which meant she had to honor hers. With a knot in her stomach, she waved her hand at the vines. "[Dispel Magic]."

The vines retracted, shriveling and vanishing back into the walls and floorboards. Deshan clumsily dropped two feet, landing on his hands and knees.

"That's all. I'm done." Jade put her hands up in reluctant surrender. "Do what you need to do."

She expected Deshan to rise and lunge at her; instead, he remained on the ground. His whole body quaked. "Yggdrasil… The home of the gods… You…"

Whatever he was going to say to June collapsed in his throat, making way for a fervent, muttered prayer. With her enhanced senses, she could still hear him, clear as day.

No, it wasn't a prayer. It was a recitation. He spoke the words of what must have been some holy book, not like a priest giving a sermon, but like a damned sinner desperately trying to understand where he went wrong.

_O, mortals of this brave world,_

_We the Six are your sworn lords and protectors._

_But while we are your Great Gods,_

_There are other cosmic powers laying in wait._

_Yggdrasil, the tree of life, the world of power and divinity,_

_Has opened its doors to this plane for good or ill._

_Vile monsters lurk beyond the veil._

_But take heart, for there are also great allies,_

_As strong and noble as any of us Great Gods._

_If you are blessed enough to meet such honorable beings,_

_Send word to the Six at once_

_And tell our beloved guests that you are a friend of the guild Elementas._

_Tell them that we wish to reforge our friendship_

_And reminisce on the Games We Played._

_Such is your God's command._

_—_

_Hear the names of our allies and treat them with reverence and worship,_

_For they are Great Gods themselves,_

_And some day they may join with the Six in protecting this world._

_The noble gods of light,_

_Commanding untold armies of angels in defense of the innocent,_

_Seraphim. _

_The brave gods of knowledge,_

_Who will venture into the furthest untamed reaches of this world and bring back its secrets,_

_World Searchers._

_The gentle gods of beasts,_

_Who will balance civilization with nature and bring peace to the wilds,_

_Great Cat Kingdom._

_The cunning gods of trickery,_

_Who encourage levity among the good and magnificently punish the wicked,_

_Ars Solanum…_

He choked on the holy passage. His face twisted in despair, and his mutterings turned less coherent, more chopped up by panicked breaths. Even if June were still listening, she probably wouldn't understand him.

Her eyes glazed over as Deshan's words swirled around in her mind. She found herself fixated on one part above all else. Not the claim that YGGDRASIL was some mystical divine realm. Not the mention of what she assumed were other guilds, who all sounded slightly familiar. Not even the ridiculous declaration that Ars Solanum was some pantheon of trickery gods.

She clutched onto a single word.

Elementas.

She knew those fuckers.


End file.
